THE 


COMPLETE   WORKS 


OF 


SAMUEL  TAYLOR  COLERIDGE. 


WITH  AN  INTRODUCTORY  ESSAY 

UPON    HIS 

PHILOSOPHICAL    AND    THEOLOGICAL   OPINIONS. 


EDITED   BY 

PROFESSOK    SHEDD. 


IN    SEVEN   VOLUMES. 
VOL.  II. 


NEW    YOEK: 

HARPER    &    BROTHERS,    PUBLISHERS, 
Nos.    329    AND    331    PEARL    STREET, 

FRANKLIN     SQUAB  E. 
1   854. 


Entered,  according  to  Act  of  Congress,  in  the  year  one  thousand 
eight  hundred  and  fifty-three,  by 

HARPER  &  BROTHERS, 

in  the  Clerk's  Office  of  the  District  Court  of  the  Southern  District 
of  New  York. 


THE 


COMPLETE  WORKS 


OP 


SAMUEL   TAYLOR    COLERIDGE, 


VOL.    II. 
THE    FRIEJSTD. 


NEW     YORK: 

HARPER     &      BROTHERS. 

1854. 


THE    FRIEND 


A  SEKIES  OF  ESSAYS 


TO    AID    IN    THE    FORMATION    OF    FIXED    PRINCIPLES 


IN  POLITICS,  MORALS,  AND  RELIGION, 


WITH  LITERARY  AMUSEMENTS  INTERSPERSED. 


BY  SAMUEL  TAYLOR  COLERIDGE. 


•WITH  THE  AUTHOR  S  LAST  CORRECTIONS  AND  AN  APPENDIX,  AND  WITH  A 
SYNOPTICAL  TABLE  OF  THE  CONTENTS  OF  THE  WORK, 

BY  HENRY  NELSON   COLERIDGE,   ESQ.,   M.A. 


NEW    YORK: 

HARPER    &    BROTHERS. 
1854. 


"V 


Now  for  the  writing  of  this  werke, 
I,  who  am  a  lonesome  clerke, 
Purposed  for  to  write  a  book 
After  the  world,  that  whilome  took 
Its  course  in  oldS  days  long  passed : 
But  for  men  sayn,  it  is  now  lassed 
In  worser  plight  than  it  was  tho, 
I  thought  me  for  to  touch  also 
The  world  which  neweth  every  day — 
So  as  I  can,  so  as  I  may, 
Albeit  I  sickness  have  and  pain, 
And  long  have  had,  yet  would  I  fain 
Do  my  mind's  hest  and  besiness, 
That  in  some  part,  so  as  I  guess, 
The  gentle  mind  may  be  advised. 

GOWER,  Pro.  to  the  Confess.  Amanti*. 


ADVERTISEMENT. 

THE  present  edition  of  THE  FRIEND  comprises  all  the  correc 
tions,  and  most  of  the  notes,  found  in  the  author's  handwriting 
in  an  interleaved  copy  of  the  work,  bequeathed  by  him  to  his 
daughter-in-law.  The  Editor  has  revised  the  text  with  as  much 
care  as  circumstances  would  permit,  and  has  added  a  prelin.indry 
sketch  of  the  plan  and  details  of  the  whole,  with  an  appendix,  con 
taining  several  passages,  parts  of  the  scattered  essays  originally 
published  in  1809,  and  omitted  in  the  recast  of  the  work  in  1818, 
but  which  seem  worthy  of  separate  preservation.  It  is  earnestly 
hoped  that  what  has  thus  been  done  may  further  the  more  general 
acceptance  of  a  work,  which,  with  all  its  imperfections,  is,  perhaps, 
the  most  vigorous  of  Mr.  Coleridge's  compositions  ;  and  which,  if 
it  had  contained  nothing  but  the  essays,  in  the  first  volume,  on 
the  duty  and  conditions  of  communicating  truth,  and  those  in 
the  third,  on  the  principles  of  scientific  method,  with  the  recon 
cilement  of  the  Platonic  and  Baconian  processes  of  investigation, 
would  still,  as  the  Editor  conceives,  have  constituted  one  of  the 
most  signal  benefits  conferred  in  this  age  on  the  cause  of  morals 
and  sound  philosophy. 

Lincoln's  Inn,    ) 
llth  Sept.  1837.) 


OBJECT  AND  PLAN  OF  THE  WORK. 


THE  FRIEND  consists  of  a  methodical  series  of  essays,  the  prin 
cipal  purpose  of  which  is  to  assist  the  mind  in  the  formation  for 
itself  of  sound,  and  therefore  permanent  and  universal,  principles 
in  regard  to  the  investigation,  perception,  and  retention  of  truth, 
in  what  direction  soever  it  may  be  pursued ;  but  pre-eminently 
with  reference  to  the  three  great  relations  in  which  we  are  placed 
in  this  world, — as  citizens  to  the  state,  as  men  to  our  neighbors, 
tend  as  creatures  to  our  Creator, — in  other  words,  to  politics,  to 
morals,  and  to  religion.  The  author  does  not  exhibit  any  perfect 
scheme  of  action  or  system  of  belief  in  any  one  of  these  relations  ; 
and  that  he  has  not  done  so,  nor  meant  to  do  so,  are  points  which 
must  be  borne  in  mind  by  every  reader  who  would  understand 
and  fairly  appreciate  the  work.  For  its  scope  is  to  prepare  and 
discipline  the  student's  moral  and  intellectual  being, — not  to  pro 
pound  dogmas  or  theories  for  his  adoption.  The  book  is  not  the 
plan  of  a  palace,  but  a  manual  of  the  rules  of  architecture.  It 
is  a  riQonaldevfja, — something  to  set  the  mind  in  a  state  of 
pure  recipiency  for  the  specific  truths  of  philosophy,  and  to  arm 
its  faculties  with  power  to  recognize  and  endure  their  presence. 

In  pursuing,  however,  this  main  design,  the  author  has  exam 
ined  with  more  or  less  minuteness  many  particular  systems  and 
codes  of  opinion  lying  in  his  way  ;  and  in  stating  the  grounds  of 
his  rejection  of  some,  and  entire  or  partial  admission  of  others  of 
them,  he  has  in  effect  expressed  his  own  convictions  upon  several 
of  the  most  important  questions,  yet  disputed  in  moral  and  politi 
cal  philosophy.  But  it  is  not  so  much  to  any  given  conclusion 
so  expressed  that  the  reader's  attention  seems  to  be  invited,  as  to 


viii  OBJECT  AND  PLAN  OF  THE  WOKK. 

the  reasoning  founded  on  principles  of  universal  application,  by 
which  such  conclusion  has  been  evolved ; — the  primary  and  pre 
vailing  aim  throughout  the  work  being,  as  well  under  the  forms 
of  criticism,  biography,  local  description,  or  personal  anecdote,  as 
of  direct  moral,  political,  or  metaphysical  disquisition,  to  lay  down 
and  illustrate  certain  fundamental  distinctions  and  rules  of  intel 
lectual  action,  which,  if  well  groundad  and  thoroughly  taken  up 
and  appropriated,  will  give  to  every  one  the  yower  of  working  out, 
under  any  circumstances,  the  conclusions  of  truth  for  himself. 
The  game  from  time  to  time  started  and  run  down  may  be  rich 
and  curious ;  but  still  at  the  end  of  the  day  it  is  the  chase  itself, 
the  quickened  eye,  the  lengthened  breath,  the  firmer  nerve,  that 
must  ever  be  the  huntsman's  best  reward. 

The  Friend  is  divided  into  two  main  sections ;  the  first  com 
prising  a  discussion  of  the  principles  of  political  knowledge  ;  the 
second  treating  of  the  grounds  of  morals  and  religion,  and  reveal 
ing  the  systematic  discipline  of  mind  requisite  for  a  true  under 
standing  of  the  same.  To  these  is  prefixed  a  general  introduc 
tion,  for  the  greater  part  devoted  to  a  statement  of  the  duty  of 
communicating  the  truth,  and  of  the  conditions  under  which  it 
may  be  communicated  safely  ;  and  three  several  collections  of 
essays,  in  some  degree  miscellaneous  and  called  Landing-Places — 
interposed  in  different  places  for  amusement,  retrospect,  and  prep 
aration — complete  the  work. 


TABLE    OF    CONTENTS. 


THE  following  synoptical  view  of  the  plan  and  contents  of  "  The 
Friend"  may  prove  useful  to  those  who  read  the  work  for  the 
first  time  in  the  present  edition. 


GENERAL  INTRODUCTION. 


Particular 
Introduction. 
Essays  I-IV. 

pp,  19-41. 


Duty  of  the 
communication 
of  truth,  and 
the  conditions 
under  which  it 
may  be  safely 
communicated. 
Essays  V-XIII. 

pp.  42-95. 


ESSAYS   I— XVI.    pp.   19-118. 

ESSAY 

I.  Design  of  the  work. 

II.  Ditto    continued :    necessity   of    attention    and 
thought,  and  distinction  between  them. 

III.  Style :  author's  hopes  and  expectations. 

IV.  Defence  against  charges  of  arrogance  and  presump 

tion. 

V.  Inexpediency   of    pious    frauds:    indifference   of 

truth  and  falsehood  denied :  objection  from  the 

impossibility  of  conveying  an  adequate  notion 

answered. 

VI.  Conditions,  under  which  right,  though  inadequate, 

notions  may  be  taught. 

VII.    (  Application  of  those  conditions  to  publications 
VIII.    •<      by  the  press : — 1.  as  between  an  individual 
IX.    (      and  his  own  conscience. 
X.  Ditto. — 2.  As  between  the  publisher  and  the  state : 

free  press. 

XI.  Law  of  libel:  its  anomalies  and  peculiar  difficul 
ties. 
XIL  Despotism  and  insecurity  without  a  free  press  • 

Charlemagne  and  Bonaparte. 

XIII.  Only  solution  of  the  difficulties  of  the  law  of  libel 
compatible  with  a  free  press:  toleration  and 
tolerance. 


TABLE  OF  CONTENTS. 


Necessity  of 

principles 
founded  in  the 
reason  as  the 

basis  of  all 
genuine  expe 
dience. 


XIV-XVI. 
pp.  95-118. 


rKSSAY 

XIV.  Clearness  of  conceptions  in  the  understanding 
essential  to  purity  in  the  will :  duty  of  commu 
nicating  knowledge. 

XV.  Right  use   of  metaphysic  reasoning :    principles 
founded  in  reason  the  sole  root  of  prudence :  dis 
tinctive  powers  of  the  human  mind. 
XVI.  Supremacy  of  the  reason :  power  given  by  acting 
f          on   principle :    falsehood   and   unworthiness   of 
modern  principles  in  taste,  morals,  and  religion. 


Historic 

parallels. 

Essays  I.  and  II. 

pp.  121-134. 

Theory  of 

Apparitions. 

Essay  III. 

pp.  134-137. 

Review  of 

the  work  and 

prospect. 

Essay  IV. 

pp.  137-142. 

On  the  Reason 

and  the 
Understanding. 

Essay  V. 
pp.  143-150. 


FIRST  LANDING-PLACE. 

ESSAYS   I-V.    pp.   121-150. 

I.  Voltaire  and  Erasmus :  Rousseau  and  Luther. 
II.  Luther's  visions  in  the  Warteburg. 


III.  Theory  to  explain  Luther's  visions :  apostrophe  on 
Thomas  Wedgwood. 


IV.  Purpose  of  the  Landing-Places :  summary  of  the 
preceding  essays:  use  of  the  term  "reason." 


V.  Do.  continued :  the  reason  and  the  understanding 
distinguished :  their  mutual  and  necessary  rela 
tion  :  eduction  of  the  conscience. 


FIRST  SECTION. 
ON  THE  PRINCIPLES  OF  POLITICAL  KNOWLEDGE. 


ESSAYS    I— XVI. 


Three  systems 

of  political 

justice,  or 

Three  theories 

on  the  origin  of 

Government. 

Essays  I-V. 

pp.  153-202. 


pp. 


153-307. 


I  System  of  Hobbes :  fear  aud  the  force  of  custom : 

confutation. 

II.  Do.  continued:  spirit  of  law:  use  of  the  phrase, 
"  original  contract." 

III.  System   of  expedience   and   prudence — adopted : 

system  of  the  pure  reason :  motives  for  exposing 
its  falsehood. 

IV.  Statement  of  the  system :  Rousseau's  "  Social  Con 

tract,"  and  Paine's  "Rights  of  Man:"  French 
physiocratic  philosophers:  Cartwright:  confu 
tation. 

V.  Cartwright ;  party-spirit :  Jacobins  and  Anti-Jac 
obins:  injudicious  treatment  of  the  former  by 
the  latter. 


TABLE   OF  CONTENTS. 


Personal  retro 
spect. 
Essay  VI. 
pp.  203-207. 

Political 

Reform. 

Essays  VII-IX. 

pp.  208-238. 


International 

Law. 

Essays  X-XIV. 
pp."  239-284. 


Principles  of 
political  con 
duct. 

Essay  XV. 
pp.  285-296. 
True  love  of 

liberty. 
Essay  XVI. 
pp.  296-307. 


VI.  The  author  never  a  Jacobin :  pantisocracy :  peace 
of  Amiens,  its  character  and  good  effects.    • 

VII.  Vulgar  errors  respecting  taxes  and  taxation :  true 

principles :  national  debt. 

VIII.  Classes  of  political  reformers :  elective  franchise. 
IX.  Catechism  preparatory  to  examination  of  the  prin 
ciples   of  the   English  Government:    letter  of 
Decatur's,  and  anecdotes  illustrative  of  principles. 
X.  Review  of  circumstances  which  led  to  the  peace 
of  Amiens,  and   recommencement   of  the  war, 
especially  with  regard  to  the  occupation  of  Malta, 
— introductory  to,  and  as  commentary  on,  the 
subject  of  international  law. 

Yj     f  Interposed  in  vindication  of  freedom  of  thought, 
J  and  of  the  duty  of  searching  out,  and  abiding  by, 
YTT     ]  the   truth:    reason   and   faith:    extracts   from 
""•    [Taylor  and  Bedell. 

XIII.  Law  of  nations :  cosmopolitism  and  nationality. 

XIV.  Law  of  nations  continued :  modern  political  econ 

omy  :  balance  of  European  power :  allegoric  fable 
on  the  seizure  of  the  Danish  fleet :  defence  of  the 
principle. 

XV.  Doctrine  of  general  consequences  as  the  best 
criterion  of  the  right  or  wrong  of  particular  ac 
tions  not  tenable  in  reason,  or  safe  in  practice. 


XVI.  Address  delivered  at  Bristol  in  1795. 


SECOND  LANDING-PLACE. 


Miseries  of 
misgovernment 

in  a  country 
nominally  free. 

Essay  I. 

pp.  311-326, 

Principles  of 

true  biograj 

Essay  IL 

pp.  326-332. 

Miscellaneous. 

Essays 
III.  and  IV. 
pp.  333-343. 


ESSAYS  I-IV.  pp.  311-343. 


I.  Tale  of  Maria  Eleonora  Scheming. 


IL  Spirit  of  anecdote-mongering  condemned :  extract 
from  R.  North's  Life  of  Lord  Keeper  Guilford. 

IIL  Fable  of  Irus  (Bonaparte)  and  Toxaris  :  Christ 
mas  within,  and  out  of  doors  in  North  Germany : 
extract  from  Mr.  Wordsworth's  MS.  poem. 

IV.  Rabbinical  Tales. 


TABLE   OF  CONTENTS. 


SECOND  SECTION. 


ON   THE   GROUNDS   OF   MORALS   AND   RELIGION,  AND    THE 

DISCIPLINE  OF  THE  MIND  REQUISITE  FOR  A  TRUE 

UNDERSTANDING  OF  THE  SAME. 

ESSAYS  i-xi.  pp.  347-472. 


Introduction. 
pp.  347-375. 


Dignity  and 
necessity  of 
speculative  phi 
losophy,  and  a 
history  of  its 

decline. 
Essays  I-III. 
pp.  376-407. 


Principles  of 
the'  Science  of 

Method. 
Essays  IV-XI. 

pp.  408-472. 


III. 


Letter  from  Mathetes  (Professor  "Wilson  and  Mr. 
A.  Blair)  :  internal  and  external  difficulties  to  a 
mind  endeavoring  to  establish  itself  on  sure 
principles,  moral  and  intellectual  :  answered  by 
The  Friend  (Mr.  Wordsworth)  :  advice  and 
caution. 

Relation  of  morality  and  religion  :  pamphlets  of 
the  age  of  Charles  I.:  -extract:  sanity  of  true 
genius  :  distinction  between  genius,  talent,  sense, 
and  cleverness  :  relative  character  of  the  national 
mind  of  Germany,  England,  and  France. 

Self-interest  and  conscience  :  ethics  not  founded  on 
utility  :  honor  :  universal  assent  a  presumption 
of  truth:  ground  of  belief  in  miracles:  true 
Christian  enthusiasm  :  mysteries  of  faith  not  to 
be  explained  by  mere  human  analogies  :  Taylor's 
latitudinarianism. 

Greek  sophists  :  their  character  and  principles  : 
separation  of  ethics  from  religion  :  the  author's 
convictions  of  the  nature  and  results  of  the  his 
tory  of  the  last  century  and  a  half. 

Method,  in  the  will  and  in  the  understanding: 
illustrated  from  Shakspcare  :  founded  on  obser 
vation  of  relations^o?  tilings":  want  and  excess  of 
generalization  :  necessity  of  a  mental  initiative  : 
definition  of  method.  P*J 


V. 
VI. 
VII. 

VIII. 
IX. 


Two  kinds  of  relations  in  which  objects  of  mind 
may  be  considered  :  1.  Law  :  synthetic  and 
analytic  process  :  Plato's  view. 

2.  Theory  :  method  in  the  fine  arts  intermediate  : 
poetry  and  music  :  mental  initiative  in  botany  : 
history  and  estimate  of  the  science  :  in  chemistry. 

Intention  of  Plato's  writings:  zoology  and  John 
Hunter  :  theory  can  not  supply  the  principle  of 
method:  nor  hypothesis:  necessity  of  an  idea: 
contrast  between  the  state  of  science  as  to  elec 
tricity  and  magnetism  :  law  of  polarity. 

True  character  of  Plato:  Aristotle:  unpleasant 
side  of  Bacon's  character  :  Hooke  :  Kepler  :  Tycho 
Brahe  :  reconcilement  of  the  Platonic  and  Bacon 
ian  methods. 

Investigation  of  the  Baconian  method:  shown  to 
be  essentially  one  with  the  Platonic,  but  in  a  dif 
ferent  direction:  method  the  guiding  light  in 
education  and  cultivation. 


TABLE   OF  CONTEXTS. 


xiii 


Principles  of 
the  Science  of 

Method. 
(continued.) 


X.  Existence  of  a  self-organizing  purpose  in  nature 
and  man :  illustrated :  operation  of  this  idea  in 
the  history  of  mankind :  patriarchal  state :  cor 
rupted  into  a  polytheism :  early  Greeks :  their 
idolatry  checked  by  the  physical  theology  of  the 
mysteries  :  portion  which  they  represented  of  the 
education  of  man :  their  discoveries  in  the  region 
of  the  pure  intellect  and  success  in  the  arts  of 
imagination  contrasted  with  their  crude  essays 
iu  the  investigation  of  physical  laws  and  phaenom- 
cna :  Romans :  Hebrews  the  mid-point  of  a  line, 
towards  which  the  Greeks  as  the  ideal,  and  the 
Romans  as  the  material,  pole  were  approximat 
ing, — Christianity  the  synthesis. 

XI.  Trade  and  Literature  essential  to  a  nation  :  conse 
quences  of  the  commercial  spirit  preponderating : 
difference  of  ultimate  aims  in  men  and  nations  : 
evidence  of  objective  reality  in  man  himself: 
nature  and  man,  union  and  difference :  mere 
being  in  its  essence :  the  idea,  whence  origina 
ted:  revelation:  God:  the  material  world  made 
for  man :  universal  laws  for  the  whole  tempered 
by  particular  laws  for  the  individual  in  nature 
and  man  :  causation :  invisible  nexus :  ground  of 
union :  difference  between  the  reason  and  the 
understanding  :  what  they  can  respectively 
achieve :  method  of  the  will :  religious  faith. 


Existence  of 

luck  or  fortune 

under  the 

Christian 

scheme. 

Essay  I. 

pp.  475-478. 


Notices  of  the 
life  and  charac 
ter  of  Sir  Alex 
ander  Ball,  and 
of  the  circum 
stances  of  the 
English  occupa 
tion  of  Malta. 
Essays  II-VI. 
pp.  479-522. 


THIRD  LANDING-PLACE. 
ESSAYS  i— vi.  pp.  475-522. 


I.  Fortune  favors  fools :  different  meanings  of  the 
proverb :  luck  has  a  real  existence  in  human  af 
fairs  :  how :  invidious  use  of  the  phrase. 


II.  Impression  left  by  Sir  A.  B.  on  the  author :  state 
of  Malta :  corruption. 

III.  Personal  memoir  of  Sir  A.  B. :  anecdotes  of  him. 

IV.  Ball  and  Nelson  :  Nelson's  reliance  on  him :  Ball 

at  the  battle  of  the  Nile :  explosion  of  the  ship 
L  Orient:  anecdote. 

V.  Ball's  habits  of  mind :  conduct  during  the  siege  of 
Valetta :  behavior  of  English  to  foreigners : 
Ball's  decisive  conduct  with  the  court  of  Naples  : 
unjust  and  unwise  treatment  of  the  Maltese  by 
the  British  government. 

VI.  Ball's  popularity  in  Malta:  jealousy  of  him  in  the 
government :  discussion  of  the  importance  of 
Malta  to  this  countrv. 


APPENDIX...  ..525 


!  were  an  author  privileged  to  name  his  own  judge, 
— in  addition  to  moral  and  intellectual  competence  I  should  look 
round  for  some  man,  whose  knowledge  and  opinions  had  for  the 
greater  part  been  acquired  experimentally  ;  and  the  practical 
habits  of  whose  life  had  put  him  on  his  guard  with  respect  to  all 
speculative  reasoning,  without  rendering  him  insensible  to  the 
desirableness  of  principles  more  secure  than  the  shifting  rules  and 
theories  generalized  from  observations  merely  empirical,  or  un 
conscious  in  how  many  departments  of  knowledge,  and  with  how 
large  a  portion  even  of  professional  men,  such  principles  are  still 
a  desideratum.  I  would  select,  too,  one  who  felt  kindly,  nay, 
even  partially,  toward  me  ;  but  one  whose  partiality  had  its 
strongest  foundations  in  hope,  and  more  prospective  than  retro 
spective  would  make  him  quick-sighted  in  the  detection,  and  un 
reserved  in  the  exposure,  of  the  deficiencies  and  defects  of  each 
present  work,  in  the  anticipation  of  a  more  developed  future.  In 
you,  honored  friend  !  I  have  found  all  these  requisites  combined 
and  realized  :  and  the  improvement,  which  these  essays  have 
derived  from  your  judgment  and  judicious  suggestions,  would,  of 
itself,  have  justified  me  in  accompanying  them  with  a  public  ac 
knowledgment  of  the  same.  But  knowing,  as  you  can  not  but 
know,  that  I  owe  in  great  measure  the  power  of  having  written 
at  all  to  your  medical  skill,  and  to  the  characteristic  good  sense 
which  directed  its  exertion  in  my  behalf;  and  whatever  I  may 

*  Dedication  to  the  second  edition. — Ed. 


XVI 

have  written  in  happier  vein  to  the  influence  of  your  society  and 
to  the  daily  proofs  of  your  disinterested  attachment  ; — knowing, 
too,  in  how  entire  a  sympathy  with  your  feelings  in  this  respect 
the  partner  of  your  name  has  blended  the  affectionate  regards  of 
a  sister  or  daughter  with  almost  a  mother's  watchful  and  un 
wearied  solicitudes  alike  for  my  health,  interest,  and  tranquillity  ; 
— you  will  not,  I  trust,  be  pained, — you  ought  not,  I  am  sure,  to 
be  surprised — that 


TO 


MR.    AND    MRS.    GILLMAN, 

OF    HIGHGATE, 

Volumes  are  bebicaiefc, 

;N  TESTIMONY  OF  HIGH  RESPECT  AND  GRATEFUL  AFFECTION, 
BY  THEIR  FRIEND, 


S.  T.  COLERIDGE. 


October  7,  1818.  { 
Higbgate.       i 


THE    FRIEND, 


ESSAY  I. 

Crede  mihi,  non  est  parvce  fiducice,  polliceri  opem  decertantibus,  consilium 
dubiis,  lumen  ccecis,  xpem  dfjectis,  refrigtrium  fessis.  Magna  quidem  hcec 
sunt,  sifiant;  parva,  si  promittantur.  Vcrum  ego  non  tarn  aliis  legem  po- 
nam,  quam  legem  vobis  mece  proprice  mentis  exponam  ;  quam  qui  probaverit, 
teneat ;  cui  non  placuerit,  abjiciat.  Optarem,  fateor,  talis  esse,  qui  prodesse 
possem  quam  plurimis.  PETRARCH.  De  vita,  solitaria.* 

Believe  me,  it  requires  no  little  confidence,  to  promise  help  to  the  strug 
gling,  counsel  to  the  doubtful,  light  to  the  blind,  hope  to  the  despondent, 
refreshment  to  the  weary.  These  are  indeed  great  things,  if  they  be  ac 
complished  ;  trifles  if  they  exist  but  in  a  promise.  I,  however,  aim  not -so 
much  to  prescribe  a  law  for  others,  as  to  set  forth  the  law  of  my  own 
mind ;  which  let  the  man,  who  shall  have  approved  of  it,  abide  by ;  and 
let  him,  to  whom  it  shall  appear  not  reasonable,  reject  it.  It  is  my  ear 
nest  wish,  I  confess,  to  employ  my  understanding  and  acquirements  in  that 
mode  and  direction,  in  which  I  may  be  enabled  to  benefit  the  largest  num 
ber  possible  of  my  fellow-creatures. 

ANTECEDENTLY  to  all  history,  and  long  glimmering  through  it 
as  a  holy  tradition,  there  presents  itself  to  our  imagination  an 
indefinite  period,  dateless  as  eternity  ;  a  state  rather  than  a  time. 
For  even  the  sense  of  succession  is  lost  in  the  uniformity  of  the 
stream. 

It  was  toward  the  close  of  this  golden  age  (the  memory  of 
which  the  self-dissatisfied  race  of  men  have  everywhere  pre 
served  and  cherished)  when  conscience  acted  in  man  with  the 
e.ase  and  uniformity  of  instinct ;  when  labor  was  a  sweet  name 
for  the  activity  of  sane  minds  in  healthful  bodies,  and  all  enjoyed 

*  Lib.  I.  tract,  iv.  c.  4.  Some  clauses  in  the  original  are  omitted,  and 
one  or  two  changes  of  words  have  been  made,  by  the  Author,  in  this  quota 
tion.— vEtf. 


20  THE    FRIEND. 

in  common  the  bounteous  harvest  produced,  and  gathered  in,  by 
common  effort ;  when  there  existed  in  the  sexes,  and  in  the  in 
dividuals  of  each  sex,  just  variety  enough  to  permit  and  call 
forth  the  gentle  restlessness  and  final  union  of  chaste  love  and 
Individual  attachment,  each  seeking  and  finding  the  beloved  one 
by  the  natural  affinity  of  their  beings  ;  when  the  dread  Sov 
ereign  of  the  universe  was  known  only  as  the  universal  parent, 
no  altar  but  the  pure  heart,  and  thanksgiving  and  grateful  love 
the  sole  sacrifice. 

In  this  blest  age  of  dignified  innocence,  one  of  their  honored 
elders,  whose  absence  they  were  beginning  to  notice,  entered 
with  hurrying  steps  the  place  of  their  common  assemblage  at 
noon,  and  instantly  attracted  the  general  attention  and  wonder 
by  the  perturbation  of  his  gestures,  and  by  a  strange  trouble  both 
in  his  eyes  and  over  his  whole  countenance.  After  a  short  but 
deep  silence,  when  the  first  buzz  of  varied  inquiry  was  becoming 
audible,  the  old  man  moved  toward  a  small  eminence,  and  hav 
ing  ascended  it,  he  thus  addressed  the  hushed  and  listening  com 
pany  : — 

"In  the  warmth  of  the  approaching  mid-day,  as  I  was  repos 
ing  in  the  vast  cavern,  out  of  which,  from  its  northern  portal, 
issues  the  river  that  winds  through  our  vale,  a  voice  powerful, 
yet  not  from  its  loudness,  suddenly  hailed  me.  Guided  by  my 
ear,  I  looked  toward  the  supposed  place  of  the  sound  for  some 
form,  from  which  it  had  proceeded.  I  beheld  nothing  but  the 
glimmering  walls  of  the  cavern.  Again,  as  I  was  turning  round, 
the  same  voice  hailed  me  :  and  whithersoever  I  turned  my  face, 
thence  did  the  voice  seem  to  proceed.  I  stood  still,  therefore, 
and  in  reverence  awaited  its  continuation.  '  Sojourner  of  earth  !' 
(these  were  its  words)  '  hasten  to  the  meeting  of  thy  brethren, 
and  the  words  which  thou  now  nearest,  the  same  do  thou  repeat 
unto  them.  On  the  thirtieth  morn  from  the  morrow's  sunrising, 
and  during  the  space  of  thrice  three  days  and  thrice  three  nights, 
a  thick  cloud  will  cover  the  sky,  and  a  heavy  rain  fall  on  the 
earth.  Go  ye  therefore,  ere  the  thirtieth  sun  arise,  retreat  to  the 
cavern  of  the  river,  and  there  abide,  till  the  clouds  have  passed 
away,  and  the  rain  be  over  and  gone.  For  know  ye  of  a  cer 
tainty  that  whomever  that  rain  wetteth,  on  him,  yea,  on  him 
and  on  his  children's  children  will  fall — the  spirit  of  madness.' 


ESSAY  I.  21 

Yes  !  madness  was  the  word  of  the  voice  :  what  this  be,  I  know 
not !  But  at  the  sound  of  the  word  trembling  came  upon  me, 
and  a  feeling  which  I  would  not  have  had  ;  and  I  remained 
even  as  ye  beheld  and  now  behold  me." 

The  old  man  ended,  and  retired.  Confused  murmurs  suc 
ceeded,  and  wonder,  and  doubt.  Day  followed  day,  and  every 
day  brought  with  it  a  diminution  of  the  awe  impressed.  They 
could  attach  no  image,  no  remembered  sensations,  to  the  threat. 
The  ominous  morn  arrived,  the  prophet  had  retired  to  the  ap 
pointed  cavern,  and  there  remained  alone  during  the  appointed 
time.  On  the  tenth  morning,  he  emerged  from  his  place  of 
shelter,  and  sought  his  friends  and  brethren.  But  alas  !  how 
affrightful  the  change  !  Instead  of  the  common  children  of  one 
great  family,  working  toward  the  same  aim  by  reason,  even  as 
the  bees  in  their  hives  by  instinct,  he  looked  and  beheld,  here  a 
miserable  wretch  watching  over  a  heap  of  hard  and  innutritious 
small  substances,  which  he  had  dug  out  of  the  earth,  at  the  cost 
of  mangled  limbs  and  exhausted  faculties.  This  he  appeared  to 
worship,  at  this  he  gazed,  even  as  the  youths  of  the  vale  had 
been  accustomed  to  gaze  at  their  chosen  virgins  in  the  first  sea 
son  of  their  choice.  There  he  saw  a  former  companion  speeding 
on  and  panting  after  a  butterfly,  or  a  withered  leaf  whirling  on 
ward  in  the  breeze  ;  and  another  with  pale  and  distorted  coun 
tenance  following  close  behind,  and  still  stretching  forth  a  dagger 
to  stab  his  precursor  in  the  back.  In  another  place  he  observed 
a  whole  troop  of  his  fellow-men  famished  and  in  fetters,  yet  led 
by  one  of  their  brethren  who  had  enslaved  them,  and  pressing 
furiously  onward,  in  the  hope  of  famishing  and  enslaving. another 
troop  moving  in  an  opposite  direction.  For  the  first  time,  the 
prophet  missed  his  accustomed  power  of  distinguishing  between 
his  dreams  and  his  waking  perceptions.  He  stood  gazing  and 
motionless,  when  several  of  the  race  gathered  around  him,  and 
inquired  of  each  other,  Who  is  this  man  ?  how  strangely  he 
looks  !  how  wild  ! — a  worthless  idler  !  exclaims  one  :  assuredly, 
a  very  dangerous  madman  !  cries  a  second.  In  short,  from 
words  they  proceeded  to  violence  :  till  harassed,  endangered, 
solitary  in  a  world  of  forms  like  his  own,  without  sympathy, 
without  object  of  love,  he  at  length  espied  in  some  foss  or  furrow 
a  quantity  of  the  maddening  water  still  unevaporated,  and  ut 
tering  the  last  words  of  reason,  IT  is  IN  VAIN  TO  BE  SANE  IN  A 


22  THE    FKIEND. 

WORLD  OF  MADMEN,  plunged  and  rolled  himself  in  the  liquid 
poison,  and  came  out  as  mad  as,  and  not  more  wretched  than, 
his  neighbors  and  acquaintances. 

The  plan  of  The  Friend  is  comprised  in  the  motto  to  this  es 
say.  This  tale  or  allegory  seems  to  me  to  contain  the  objec 
tions  to  its  practicability  in  all  their  strength.  Either,  says 
the  skeptic,  you- are  the  blind  offering  to  lead  the  blind,  or  you 
are  talking  the  language  of  sight  to  those  who  do  not  possess 
the  sense  of  seeing.  If  you  mean  to  be  read,  try  to  entertain, 
and  do  not  pretend  to  instruct.  To  such  objections  it  would  be 
amply  sufficient,  on  my  system  of  faith,  to  answer,  that  we  are 
not  all  blind,  but  all  subject  to  distempers  of  the  mental  sight, 
\  differing  in  kind  and  in  degree  ;  that  though  all  men  are  in 
/  error,  they  are  not  all  in  the  same  error,  nor  at  the  same  time ; 
)  and  that  each,  therefore,  may  possibly  heal  the  other,  even  as 
(  two  or  more  physicians,  all  diseased  in  their  general  health,  yet 
\under  the  immediate  action  of  the  disease  on  different  days, 
may  remove  or  alleviate  the  complaints  of  each  other.  But  in 
respect  to  the  entertainingness  of  moral  writings,  if  in  entertain 
ment  be  included  whatever  delights  the  imagination  or  affects 
the  generous  passions,  so  far  from  rejecting  such  a  mean  of  per 
suading  the  human  SQ ul,  my  very  system  compels  me  to  defend 
riot  only  the  propriety,  but  the  absolute  necessity,  of  adopting  it, 
if  we  really  intend  to  render  our  fellow-creatures  better  or  wiser. 
But  it  is  with  dullness  as  with  obscurity.  It  may  be  positive, 
and  the  author's  fault  ;  but  it  may  likewise  be  relative,  and  if 
the  author  has  presented  his  bill  of  fare  at  the  portal,  the  reader 
has  himself  only  to  blame.  The  main  question  then  is,  of  what 
class  are  the  persons  to  be  entertained  ? — "  One  of  the  later  school 
of  the  Grecians  (says  Lord  Bacon)  examineth  the  matter,  and  is 
at  a  stand  to  think  what  should  be  in  it  that  men  should  love 
lies,  where  neither  they  make  for  pleasure,  as  with  poets  ;  nor 
for  advantage,  as  with  the  merchant  ;  but  for  the  lie's  sake. 
But  I  can  not  tell  :  this  same  truth  is  a  naked  and  open  daylight, 
that  doth  not  show  the  masques  and  mummeries  and  triumphs 
of  the  world  half  so  stately  and  daintily,  as  candle-lights.  Truth 
may  perhaps  come  to  the  price  of  a  pearl,  that  showeth  best  by 
day  ;  but  it  will  not  rise  to  the  price  of  a  diamond  or  carbuncle, 
that  showeth  best  in  varied  lights.  A  mixture  of  a  lie  doth  ever 
add  pleasure.  Doth  any  man  doubt  that  if  there  were  taken 


ESSAY    I.  23 

from  men's  minds,  vain  opinions,  flattering  hopes,  false  valua 
tions,  imaginations  as  one  would,  and  the  like,  but  it  would  leave 
the  minds  of  a  number  of  men,  poor  shrunken  things,  full  of 
melancholy  and  indisposition,  and  unpleasing  to  themselves  ?"* 

A  melancholy,  a  too  general,  but  not,  I  trust,  a  universal 
truth ! — and  even  where  it  does  apply,  yet  in  many  instances 
not  irremediable.  Such  at  least  must  have  been  my  persuasion  ;  or 
the  present  volumes  must  have  been  wittingly  written  to  no  pur 
pose.  If  I  believed  our  nature  fettered  to  all  this  wretchedness 
of  head  and  heart  by  an  absolute  and  innate  necessity,  at  least 
by  a  necessity  which  no  human  power,  no  efforts  of  reason  or 
eloquence,  could  remove  or  lessen ;  I  should  deem  it  even  pre 
sumptuous  to  aim  at  other  or  higher  object  than  that  of  amusing 
a  small  portion  of  the  reading  public. 

And  why  not  ?  whispers  worldly  prudence.  To  amuse,  though 
only  to  amuse,  our  visitors  is  wisdom  as  well  as  good-nature, 
where  it  is  presumption  to  attempt  their  amendment.  And 
truly  it  would  be  most  convenient  to  me  in  respects  of  no  trifling 
importance,  if  I  could  persuade  myself  to  take  the  advice.  Re 
leased  by  these  principles  from  all  moral  obligation,  and  ambi 
tious  of  procuring  pastime  and  self-oblivion  for  a  race,  which 
could  have  nothing  noble  to  remember,  nothing  desirable  to  an 
ticipate,  I  might  aspire  even  to  the  praise  of  the  critics  and 
dilettanti  of  the  higher  circles  of  society ;  of  some  trusty  guide 
(:{  liiiinl  fashion;  some  ])!'-;is;in1  ;iii;:!yst  oftastej  ;'S  it  exists  Imiii 
in  the  palate  and  the  soul ;  some  living  gauge  and  mete-wand 
of  past  and  present  genius.  But  alas  !  my  former  studies  would 
still  have  left  a  wrong  bias  !  If  instead  of  perplexing  my  com 
mon  sense  with  the  flights  of  Plato,  and'  of  stiffening  over  the 
meditations  of  the  imperial  Stoic,  I  had  been  laboring  to  imbibe 
the  gay  spirit  of  a  Casti,  or  had  employed  my  erudition,  for  the 
benefit  of  the  favored  few,  in  elucidating  the  interesting  deformi 
ties  of  ancient  Greece  and  India,  what  might  I  not  have  hoped 
from  the  suffrage  of  those,  who  turn  in  weariness  from  the  Para 
dise  Lost,  because  compared  with  the  prurient  heroes  and  gro 
tesque  monsters  of  Italian  romance,  or  even  with  the  narrative 
dialogues  of  the  melodious  Metastasio,  that  adventurous  song, 

Which  justifies  the  ways  of  God  to  man, — 
*  Essays.  I.  Of  Truth.— Ed. 


24  THE    FRIEND. 

has  been  found  a  poor  substitute  for  a  Grimaldi,  a  most  inapt 
medicine  for  an  occasional  propensity  to  yawn !  ffor,  as  hath 
been  decided,  to  fill  up  pleasantly  the  brief  intervals  of  fashion 
able  pleasures,  and  above  all  to  charm  away  the  du^ky  gnome 
of  ennui)  in  the  chief  and  appropriate  business  of  the  poet  and 
the  novelist"!  This  duty  uniultilled,  Apollo  will  have  lavished 
Ills  host  gills  in  vain;  and  Urania  henceforth  must  he  content 
to  inspire  astronomers  alone,  and  leave  the  sons  of  verse  to  more 
amusing  patronesses.  And  yet — and  yet — but  it  will  be  time  to 
f  be  serious,  when  my  visitors  have  sat  down. 


ESSAY    II. 


Sic  oportf.t  ad  librum,  presertim  miscellanei  generis,  leyendum  acccderc  Icc- 
torem,  ut  solct  ad  convivium  conviva  civil  is.  Oonvivator  annititur  omnibus 
satisfacere :  ct  tamen  si  quid  apponitur,  quod  hujus  aut  illiuc,  palato  non 
resoondeat,  ct  hie  el  ille  urbane  disximulant,  et  alia  fercula  probc/int,  ne  quid 
contristent  convivatorem.  Quis  enim  eum  convivam  ferat,  qui  tantum  hoc 
animo  veniat  ad  mensam,  ut  carpens  qua  apponunter,  nee  vescatur  ipse,  nee 
alias  vesci  sinat  ?  Et  tamen  his  quoque  reperias  inciviliores,-1  qui  palam,  qui 
sine  Jin e  damnent  ac  lacerent  opus,  quod  nunquam  legerint.  Ast,  hoc  plus- 
quam  sycophanticum  est  damnare  quod  nescias.  ERASMUS. 

A  reader  should  sit  down  to  a  book,  especially  of  the  miscellaneous  kind, 
as  a  well-behaved  visitor  does  to  a  banquet.  The  master  of  the  feast  exerts 
himself  to  satisfy  all  his  guests ;  but  if  after  all  his  care  and  pains  there 
should  still  be  something  or  other  put  on  the  table  that  does  not  suit  this 
or  that  person's  taste,  they  politely  pass  it  over  without  noticing  the  cir 
cumstance,  and  commend  other  dishes,  that  they  may  not  distress  th^ir  kind 
host,  or  throw  any  damp  on  his  spirits.  For  who. could  tolerate  a  guest 
that  accepted  an  invitation  to  your  table  with  no  other  purpose  but  that  of 
finding  fault  with  every  thing  put  before  him,  neither  eating  himself,  nor 
suffering  others  to  eat  in  comfort.  And  yet  you  may  fall  in  with  a  still 
worse  set  than  even  these,  with  churls  that  in  all  companies  and  without 
stop  or  stay,  will  condemn  and  pull  to  pieces  a  work  which  they  have  never 
read.  But  this  sinks  below  the  baseness  of  an  informer,  yea,  though  he 
were  a  false  witness  to  boot !  The  man,  who  abuses  a  thing  of  which  he  is 
utterly  ignorant,  unites  the  infamy  of  both — and  in  addition  to  this,  makes 
himself  the  pander  and  sycophant  of  his  own  and  other  men's  envy  and  ma 
lignity. 

THE  musician  may  tune  his  instrument  in  private,  ere  his 
audience  have  yet  assembled  ;  the  architect  conceals  the  founda 
tion  of  his  building  beneath  the  superstructure.  But  an  author's 
harp  must  be  tuned  in  the  hearing  of  those,  who  are  to  under 
stand  its  after-harmonies  ;  the  foundation  stones  of  his  edifice 
must  lie  open  to  common  view,  or  his  friends  will  hesitate  to 
trust  themselves  beneath  the  roof. 

From  periodical  literature  the  general  reader  deems  himself 

VOL.  n.  B 


20  THE  FRIEND. 

entitled  to  expect  amusement,  and  some  degree  of  information, 
and  if  the  writer  can  convey  any  instruction  at  the  same  time, 
and  without  demanding  any  additional  thought  (as  the  Irishman, 
in  the  hackneyed  jest,  is  said  to  have  passed  off  a  light  guinea 
between  two  good  halfpence),  this  supererogatory  merit  will  not 
perhaps  he  taken  amiss.  Kow  amusement  in  and  for  itself  may 
be  afforded  by  the  gratification  either  of  the  curiosity  or  of  the 
passions. '  I  use  the  former  word  as  distinguished  from  the  love 
of  knowledge,  and  the  latter  in  distinction  from  those  emotions 
which  arise  in  well-ordered  minds,  from  the  perception  of  truth 
or  falsehood,  virtue  or  vice  : — emotions,  which  are  always  pre 
ceded  by  thought,  and  linked  with  improvement.  Again,  all  in 
formation  pursued  without  any  wish  of  becoming  wiser  or  better 
thereby,  I  class  among  the  gratifications  of  mere  curiosity,  whether 
it  be  sought  for  in  a  .light  novel  or  a  grave  history.  We  may 
therefore  omit  the  word  information,  as  included  either  in  amuse 
ment  or  instruction . 

The  present  work  is  an  experiment ;  not  whether  a  writer 
may  honestly  overlook  the  one,  or  successfully  omit  the  other, 
of  the  two  elements  themselves,  which  serious  readers  at  least 
persuade  themselves  that  they  pursue  ;  but  whether  a  change 
might  not  be  hazarded  of  the  usual  order,  in  which  periodical 
writers  have  in  general  attempted  to  convey  them.  Having  my 
self  experienced  that  no  delight  either  in  kind  or  degree  is  equal 
to  that  which  accompanies  the  distinct  perception  of  a  funda 
mental  truth,  relative  to  our  moral  being  ;  having,  long  after  the 
completion  of  what  is  ordinarily  called  a  learned  education,  dis 
covered  a  new  world  of  intellectual  profit  opening  on  me — not 
from  any  new  opinions,  but  lying,  as  it  were,  at, the  roots  of  those 
which  I  had  been  taught  in  childhood  in  my  catechism  and 
spelling-book  ;  there  arose  a  soothing  hope  in  my  mind  that  a 
lesser  public  might  be  found,  composed  of  persons  susceptible  of 
the  same  delight,  and  desirous  of  attaining  it  by  the  same  pro 
cess.  I  heard  a  whisper  too  from  within,  (I  trust  that  it  pro 
ceeded  from  conscience,  not  vanity)  that  a  duty  was  performed  in 
the  endeavor  to  render  it  as  much  easier  to  them,  than  it  had 
been  to  me,  as  could  be  effected  by  the  united  efforts  of  my  un 
derstanding  and  imagination. 

Actuated  by  this  impulse,  the  writer  wishes,  in  the  following 
essays,  to  convey  not  instruction  merely,  but  fundamental  in- 


ESSAY  II.  27 

struction  ;  not  so  much  to  show  the  reader  this  or  that  fact,  as 
to  kindle  his  own  torch  for  him,  and  leave  it  to  himself  to  choose 
i  the  particular  objects,  which  he  might  wish  to  examine  by  its 
light.  The  Friend  does  not  indeed  exclude  from  his  plan  occa 
sional  interludes,  and  vacations  of  innocent  entertainment  and 
promiscuous  information,  but  still  in  the  main  he  proposes  to 
himself  the  communication  of  such  delight  as  rewards  the  march 
of  truth,  rather  than  to  collect  the  flowers  which  diversify  its 
track,  in  order  to  present  them  apart  from  the  homely,  yet  food- 
ful  or  medicinal  herbs,  among  which  they  had  grown.  To  refer 
men's  opinions  to  their  absolute  principles,  and  thence  their  feel 
ings  to  the  appropriate  objects,  and  in  their  due  degrees  ;  arid 
finally,  to  apply  the  principles  thus  ascertained,  to  the  formation 
of  steadfast  convictions  concerning  the  most  important  questions 
of  politics,  morality,  and  religion — these  are  to  be  the  objects  and 
the  contents  of  his  work. 

Themes  like  these  not  even  the  genius  of  a  Plato  or  a  Bacon 
could  render  intelligible,  without  demanding  from  the  reader 
thought  sometimes,  and  attention  generally.  By  thought  I  here 
mean  the  voluntary  production  in  our  own  minds  of  those  states 
of  consciousness,  to  which,  as  to  his  fundamental  facts,  the  writer 
has  referred  us  :  while  attention  has  for  its  object  the  order  and 
connection  of  thoughts  and  images,  each  of  which  is  in  itself 
already  and  familiarly  known.  Thus  the  elements  of  geometry 
require  attention  only ;  but  the  analysis  of  our  primary  faculties, 
and  the  investigation  of  all  the  absolute  grounds  of  religion  and 
morals,  are  impossible  without  energies  of  thought  in  addition  to 
the  effort  of  attention.  The  Friend  will  not  attempt  to  disguise 
from  his  readers  that  both  attention  and  thought  are  efforts,  and 
the  latter  a  most  difficult  and  laborious  effort ;  nor  from  himself, 
that  to  require  it  often  or  for  any  continuance  of  time,  is  incom 
patible  with  the  nature  of  the  present  publication,  even  were  it 
less  incongruous  than  it  unfortunately  is  with  the  present  habits 
and  pursuits  of  Englishmen.  Accordingly  I  shall  be  on  my 
guard  to  make  the  essays  as  few  as  possible,  which  would  require 
from  a  well-educated  reader  any  energy  of  thought  and  voluntary 
abstraction. 

But  attention,  I  confess,  will  be  requisite  throughout,  except 
in  the  excursive  and  miscellaneous  essays  that  will  be  found  inter 
posed  between  each  of  the  three  main  divisions  of  the  work.  On 


28  THE    FKIKND. 

whatever  subject    the  mind   feels  a  lively  interest,   attention, 

though  always  an  eflbrt,  becomes  a  delightful  ellbrt.  I  should 
ho  quite  at,  case,  could  I  secure  lor  the  whole  work  as  much  of  it, 
an  a  card  party  of  earnest  whist-players  often  expend  in  a  single 
evening,  or  a  lady  in  the  making-tip  of  a  fashionable  dress.  But 
where  no  interest  previously  exists,  attention  (as  every  school 
master  known)  can  he  procured  only  hy  terror:  which  is  the  true 
reason  why  the  majority  of  mankind  learn  nothing  systematically, 
except  as  school-hoys  or  apprentices. 

f  Happy  shall  I  he,  from  other  motives  besi^os  those  of  self-inter- 
/est,  if  no  fault  or  deficiency  on  my  part  shall  prevent  the  work 
ji'rom  furnishing  a.  presumptive  proof,  thai  there  are  still  to  ho 
Mound  among  us  a  respectable  number  of  readers  who  art;  desirous 
Jto  derive  pleasure  from  the  consciousness  of  being  instructed  or 
I  meliorated  :  and  who  (eel  a  sufficient  interest  as  to  the  foundations 
/of  their  own  opinions  in  literature,  polities,  morals,  and  religion, 
i  to  afford  that  degree  of  attention,  without  which,  however  men 
/may  deceive  themselves,  no  actual  progress  ever  was  or  ever  eau 
)\w  made  in  that  knowledge,  which  supplies  at  once  both  strength 
I  and  nourishment. 


ESSAY    III. 


A  A  A'  <if  Trap&aftov  T//V  TK%VI]V  irapH  aov, 
Qifiovaav  vni)  KOfnraa/LiiiTuv,  KCIC  pi)fj.uTuv 

uTiarov  avrijv,  /cat  ro 
/f  Kal  TrrpnruToic  Kal  TEvrtdoiat,  [iiKpol? 
XvXoi'  (Jt^oT'f  oruuv^uuTUVf  UTTO  f3if3^,iti)Vf  I'ITT'  7/OcJv. 

AuisToni.  RAN^E.  939. 

IMITATION* 

When  I  received  the  Muse  from  you,  I  found  her  puffed  nud  pampered, 

With  pompous  sentences  and  terms,  a  cumbrous  huge  virago. 

My  first  attention  was  applied  to  make  her  look  genteelly, 

And  bring  her  to  a  moderate  bulk  by  dint  of  lighter  diet, 

I  fed  her  with  plain  household  phrase,  and  cool  familiar  salad, 

With  water-gruel  episode,  with  sentimental  jelly, 

With  moral  mince-meat:  till  at  length  I  brought  her  within  compass. 

FttERK. 

IN  the  preceding  essay  I  named  the  present  undertaking  an 
experiment.  The  explanation  will  be  found  in  the  following 
letter,  written  to  a  correspondent  during  thcjirst  attempt,  and 
before  the  plan  was  discontinued  from  an  original  error  in  the 
mode  of  circulation. 

When  I  first  undertook  the  present  publication  for  the  sake 
and  with  the  avowed  object  of  referring  men  in  all  things  to 
principles  or  fundamental  truths,  I  was  well  aware  of  the  obsta 
cles  which  the  plan  itself  would  oppose  to  my  success.  For  in 

*  This  imitation  is  printed  here  by  permission  of  the  author,  from  a 
series  of  free  translations  of  selected  scenes  from  Aristophanes :  a  work,  of 
which  (should  the  author  be  persuaded  to  make  it  public)  it  is  my  deliberate 
judgment,  that  it  will  form  an  important  epoch  in  English  literature,  and 
open  out  sources  of  metrical  and  rhythmical  wealth  in  the  very  heart  of  our 
language,  of  which  few,  if  any,  among  us  are  aware. 


00  THE     FRIEND. 

order  to  the  regular  attainment  of  this  object,  all  the  dryest  and 
least  attractive  essays  must  appear  in  the  beginning,  and  thus 
subject  me  to  the  necessity  of  demanding  effort  or  soliciting  pa 
tience  in  that  part  of  the  work,  where  it  was  most  my  interest 
to  secure  the  confidence  of  my  readers  by  winning  their  favor. 
Though  I  dared  warrant  for  the  pleasantness  of  the  journey  on 
the  whole  ;  though  I  might  promise  that  the  road  would,  for  the 
far* greater  part  of  it,  be  found  plain  and  easy,  that  it  would  pass 
through  countries  of  various  prospect,  and  that  at  every  stage 
there  would  be  a  change  of  company  ;  it  still  remained  a  heavy 
disadvantage,  that  I. had  to  start  at  the  foot  of  a  high  and  steep 
hill  :  and  I  foresaw,  not  without  occasional  feelings  of  despond 
ency,  that  during  the  slow  and  laborious  ascent  it  would  require 
no  common  management  to  keep  my  passengers  in  good-humor 
with  the  vehicle  and  its  driver.  As  far  as  this  inconvenience 
could  be  palliated  by  sincerity  and  previous  confession,  I  "have  no 
reason  to  accuse  myself  of  neglect.  In  the  prospectus^  of  The 
Friend,  which  for  this  cause  I  reprinted  and  annexed  to  the  first 
essay,  I  felt  it  my  duty  to  inform  such  as  might  be  inclined  to 
patronize  the  publication,  that  I  must  submit  to  be  esteemed  dull 
by  those  who  sought  chiefly  for  amusement :  and  this  I  hazarded 
as  a  general  confession,  though  in  my  own  mind  I  felt  a  cheerful 
confidence  that  it  would  apply  almest  exclusively  to  the  earlier 
essays.  I  could  not  therefore  be  surprised,  however  much  I  may 
have  been  depressed,  by  the  frequency  with  which  you  hear  The 
Friend  complained  of  for  its  abstruseness  and  obscurity ;  nor  did 
the  highly  flattering  expressions,  with  which  you  accompanied 
your  communication,  prevent  me  from  feeling  its  truth  to  the 
whole  extent. 

An  author's  pen,  like  children's  legs,  improves  by  exercise. 
That  part  of  the  blame  which  rests  on  myself,  I  am  exerting  my 
best  faculties  to  remove.  A  man  long  accustomed  to  silent  and 
solitary  meditation,  in  proportion  as  he  increases  the  power  of 
thinking  in  long  and  connected  trains,  is  apt  to  lose  or  lessen  the 
talent  of  communicating  his  thoughts  with  grace  and  perspicuity. 
Doubtless  too,  I  have  in  some  measure  injured  my  style,  in  respect 
to  its  facility  and  popularity,  from  having  almost  confined  my 
reading,  of  late  years,  to  the  works  of  the  ancients  and  those  of 
the  elder  writers  in  the  modern  languages.  We  insensibly  imitate 
*  See  Appendix  A. — Ed. 


ESSAY    III.  31 

what  we  habitually  admire  ;  and  an  aversion  to  the  epigrammatic 
unconnected  periods  of  the  fashionable  Anglo-Gallic  an  taste  has 
too  often  made  me  willing  to  forget,  that  the  stat6ly  march 
and  difficult  evolutions,  which  characterize  "the  eloquence  of 
Hooker,  Bacon,  Milton,  and  Jeremy  Taylor,  are,  notwithstanding 
their  intrinsic  excellence,  still  less  suited  to  a  periodical  essay. 
This  fault  I  am  now  endeavoring  to  correct ;  though  I  can  never 
*o  far  sacrifice  rny  judgment  to  the  desire  of  being  immediately 
popular,  as  to  cast  my  sentences  in  the  French  moulds,  or  affect 
a  style  which  an  ancient  critic  would  have  deemed  purposely 
invented  for  persons  troubled  with  the  asthma  to  read,  and  for 
those  to  comprehend  who  labor  under  the  more  pitiable  asthma 
of  a  short-wittcd  intellect.  It  can  not  but  be  injurious  to  the 
human  mind  never  to  be  called  into  effort :  the  habit  of  receiving 
pleasure  without  an  v  exertion  of  thought,  by  the  mere  excitement 
of  curiosity  and  sensibility,  maybe  justly  ranked  among  the  worst 
effects  of  habitual  novel  reading.  It  is  true  that  these  short  and 
unconnected  sentences  are  easily  and  instantly  understood  :  but 
it  is  equally  true,  that  wanting  all  the  cement  of  thought  as  well 
as  of  style,  all  the  connections,  and  (if  you  will  forgive  so  trivial 
a  metaphor)  all  the  hooks-and-eyes  of  the  memory,  they  are 
easily  forgotten  :  or  rather,  it  is  scarcely  possible  that  they  should 
be  remembered. — Nor  is  it  less  true,  that  those  who  confine  their 
reading  to  such  books  dwarf  their  own  faculties,  and  finally  re- 
duce  their  understandings  to  a  deplorable  imbecility  :  the  fact  ^du 
mention,  andwhich  I  shall  hereafter  make  use  of,  is  a  fair  in 
stance  and  a  striking  illustration.  Like  idle  morning  visitors,  the 
brisk  arid  breathless  periods  hurry  in  and  hurry  off  in  quick  and 
profitless  succession  ;  each  indeed  for  the  moments  of  its  stay  pre 
vents  the  pain  of  vacancy,  while  it  indulges  the  love  of  sloth  ; 
but  all  together  they  leave  the  mistress  of  the  house  (the  soul,  I 
mean)  flat  and  exhausted,  incapable  of  attending  to  her  own  con 
cerns,  and  unfitted  for  the  conversation  of  more  rational  guests. 

1  know  you  will  not  suspect  me  of  fostering  so  idle  a  hope,  as 
that  of  obtaining  acquittal  by  recrimination  ;  or  think  that  I  am 
attacking  one  fault,  in  order  that  its  opposite  may  escape  notice 
in  the  noise  and  smoke  of  the  battery.  On  the  contrary,  I  shall 
do  my  best,  and  even  make  all  allowable  sacrifices,  to  render 
my  manner  more  attractive  and  my  matter  more  generally  inter 
esting.  Iii  the  establishment  of  principles  and  fundamental  doc- 


C2  THE    FRIEND. 

triues,  I  must  of  necessity  require  the  attention  of  my  reader  to 
become  my  fellow-laborer.  The  primary  facts  essential  to  the 
intelligibility  of  my  principles  I  can  prove  to  others  only  as  far 
as  I  can  prevail-  on  them  to  retire  into  themselves  and  make 
their  own  minds  the  objects  of  their  steadfast  attention.  But,  on 
the  other  hand,  I  feel  too  deeply  the  importance  of  the  convic 
tions,  which  first  impelled  me  to  the  present  undertaking,  to  leave 
miattempted  any  honorable  means  of  recommending  them  to  as 
wide  a  circle  as  possible. 

Hitherto  I  have  been  employed  in  laying  the  foundation  of  my 
work.  But  the  proper  merit  of  a  foundation  is  its  massiveness 
and  solidity.  The  conveniences  and  ornaments,  the  gilding  and 
stucco"  work,  the  sunshine  and  sunny  prospects,  will  come  with 
the  superstructure.  Yet  I  dare  not  flatter  myself,  that  any  en 
deavors  of  mine,  compatible  with  the  duty  I  owe  to  truth  and 
the  hope  of  permanent  utility,  will  render  The  Friend  agreeable 
to  the  majority  of  what  is  called  the  reading  public.  I  never 
expected  it.  How  indeed  could  I,  when  I  was  to  borrow  so  little 
from  the  influence  of  passing  events,  and  when  I  had  absolutely 
excluded  from  my  plan  all  appeals  to  personal  curiosity  and  per 
sonal  interests  ?  Yet  even  this  is  not  rny  greatest  impediment. 
No  real  information  can  be  conveyed,  no  important  errors  recti 
fied,  no  widely  injurious  prejudices  rooted  up,  without  requiring 
some  effort  of  thought  on  the  part  of  the  reader.  But  the  obsti 
nate  (and  toward  a  contemporary  writer,  the  contemptuous) 
aversion  to  intellectual  effort  is  the  mother  evil  of  all  which  I 
had  proposed  to  war  against,  the  queen  bee  in  the  hive  of  our 
errors  and  misfortunes,  both  private  and  national.  To  solicit  the 
attention  of  those,  on  whom  these  debilitating  causes  have  acted 
to  their  full  extent,  Avould  be  no  less  absurd  than  to  recommend 
exercise  with  the  dumb-bells,  as  the  only  mode  of  cure,  to  a  pa 
tient  paralytic  in  both  arms.  You  well  know,  that  my  expecta 
tions  were  more  modest  as  well  as  more  rational.  I  hoped,  that 
my  readers  in  general  would  be  aware  of  the  impracticability  of 
suiting  every  essay  to  every  taste  in  any  period  of  the  work  ;  and 
that  they  would  not  attribute  wholly  to  the  author,  but  in  part 
to  the  necessity  of  his  plan,  the  austerity  and  absence  of  the 
lighter  graces  in  the  first  fifteen  or  twenty  numbers.  In  my 
cheerful  moods  I  sometimes  flattered  myself,  that  a  few  even 
among  those,  who  foresaw  that  my  lucubrations  would  at  all 


ESSAY    III.  33 

times  require  more  attention  than  from  the  nature  of  their  own 
employments  they  could  afford  them,  might  yet  find  a  pleasure 
in  supporting  The  Friend  during  its  infancy,  so  as  to  give  it  a 
chance  of  attracting  the  notice  of  others,  to  whom  its  style  and 
subjects  might  be  better  adapted.  But  my  main  anchor  was  the 
hope,  that  when  circumstances  gradually  enabled  me  to  adopt 
the  ordinary  means  of  making  the  publication  generally  known, 
there  might  be  found  throughout  the  kingdom  a  sufficient  num 
ber  of  meditative  minds,  who,  entertaining  similar  convictions 
with  myself,  and  gratified  by  the  prospect  of  seeing  them  re 
duced  to  form  and  system,  would  take  a  warm  interest  in  the 
work  from  the  very  circumstance,  that  it  wanted  those  allure 
ments  of  transitory  interests,  which  render  particular  patronage 
superfluous,  and  for  the  brief  season  of  their  blow  and  fragrance 
attract  the  eye  of  thousands,  who  would  pass  unregarded 

flower  s 


Of  sober  tint,  and  herbs  of  med'cinable  powers. 


In  these  three  introductory  essays,  the  Friend  has  endeavored 
to  realize  his  promise  of  giving  an  honest  bill  of  fare,  both  as  to 
the  objects  and  the  style  of  the  work.  With  reference  to  both  I 
conclude  with  a  prophecy  of  Simon  Grynaeus,  from  his  premoni 
tion  to  the  candid  reader,  prefixed  to  Ficinus's  translation  of 
Plato,  published  at  Leyden,  1557.  How  far  it  has  been  gradu 
ally  fulfilled  in  this  country  since  the  Revolution  in  1688,  I  leave 

to  my  candid  and  intelligent  readers  to  determine  : — 

^_ > 

Ac  dolet  mihi  quidem  deliciis  literarum  incscatos  subito  jam 
homines  adeo  esse,  prtesertim  qui  Christianas  se  profitentur ,  ut 
legere  nisi  quod  ad  presentem  gustumfacit,  sustineant  nihil : 
unde  et  disciplines  et  philosophia  ipsa  jam  fere  prorsus  etiam  a 
doctis  negliguntur.  Quod  quidem  propositum  studiorum  nisz 
mature  corrigetur,  tarn  magnum  rebus  incommodum  dabit,  quam 
dedit  barbaries  olim.  Pertinax  res  barbaries  est,  fateor ;  sed 
minus  potent  tamen,  quam  ilia  persuasa  prudcntia  literarum  si 
ratione  caret,  sapientice  virtutisque  specie  misere  lectores  circum- 
ducens.  *  * 

Succedet  igitur,  ut  arbitror,  hand  ita  multo  post,  pro  rusti- 


34  THE    FRIEND. 

cana  sceculi  nostri  ruditate,  captatrix  ilia  blandiloquentia,  robur 
animi  virilis  omne,  omncm  virtutem  masculam,  projligatura, 
nisi  cavetur* 

In  very  truth,  it  grieveth  me  that  men,  those  especially  who 
profess  themselves  to  be  Christians,  should  be  so  taken  with  the 
sweet  baits  of  literature  that  they  can  endure  to  read  nothing 
but  what  gives  them  immediate  gratification,  no  matter  how  low 
or  sensual  it  may  be.  Consequently,  the  more  austere  and  disci 
plinary  branches  of  philosophy  itself  are  almost  wholly  neglected, 
even  by  the  learned. — A  course  of  study  (if  such  reading,  with 
such  a  purpose  in  view,  could  deserve  that  name)  which,  if  not 
corrected  in  time,  will  occasion  worse  consequences  than  even 
barbarism  did  in  the  times  of  our  forefathers.  Barbarism  is,  I 
own,  a  wilful  headstrong  thing  ;  but  with  all  its  blind  obstinacy 
it  has  less  power  of  doing  harm  than  this  self-sufficient,  self-satis 
fied  plain  good  common  sense  sort  of  writing,  this  prudent  sale 
able  popular  style  of  composition,  if  it  be  deserted  by  reason  and 
scientific  insight  pitiably  decoying  the  minds  of  men  by  an  impos 
ing  show  of  amiableness,  and  practical  wisdom,  so  that  the  de 
lighted  reader  knowing  nothing  knows  all  about  almost  every 
thing.  There  will  succeed,  therefore,  in  my  opinion,  and  that 
too  within  no  long  time,  to  the  rudeness  and  rusticity  of  our  age, 
that  ensnaring  meretricious  popularness  in  literature,  with  all 
the  tricksy  humilities  of  the  ambitious  candidates  for  the  favor 
able  suffrages  of  the  judicious  public,  which  if  we  do  not  take 
good  care  will  break  up  and  scatter  before  it  all  robustness  and 
manly  vigor  of  intellect,  all  masculine  fortitude  of  virtue. 

•W 

*  In  the  original  of  this  passage,  the  -words  gulam  and  mortales  stand  re 
spectively  for  prtesentem  gustum  and  lectores. — Ed. 


ESSAY    IV. 

Si  modo  quce  natura  et  ratione  concessa  sint,  assumpserimus,  prcesump- 
tionis  suspicio  a  nobis  quam  longissitne  abesse  debct.  Multa  antiquitati,  no- 
bismet  nihil,  arrogamtis.  Nihilne  vos  ?  Nihil  mehercule,  nisi  quod  omnia 
omni  animo  veritati  arrogamus  et  sanctimonies. 

ULE.  Rixov.  De  Controversiis. 

If  we  assume  only  what  nature  and  reason  have  granted,  with  no  shadow 
of  right  can  we  be  suspected  of  presumption.  To  antiquity  we  arrogate 
many  things,  to  ourselves  nothing.  Nothing  ?  Aye,  nothing :  unless  in 
deed  it  be,  that  with  all  our  strength  we  arrogate  all  things  to  truth  and 
moral  purity. 

IT  has  been  remarked  by  the  celebrated  Hailer,  that  we  are 
deaf  while  we  are  yawning.  The  same  act  of  drowsiness  that 
stretches  open  our  mouths,  closes  our  ears.  It  is  much  the  same 
in  acts  of  the  understanding.  A  lazy  half-attention  amounts  to 
a  mental  yawn.  "Where  then  a  subject,  that  demands  thought, 
has  been  thoughtfully  treated,  and  Avith  an  exact  and  patient 
derivation  from  its  principles,  we  must  be  willing  to  exert  a  por 
tion  of  the  same  effort,  and  to  think  Avit.h  the  author,  or  the  au 
thor  Avill  have  thought  in  vain  for  us.  It  makes  little  difference 
"for  the  time  being,  whether  there  he  an  hint-its  oscitans  in  the 
reader's  attention,  or  an  hiatus  lacrymabilis  in  the  author's 
manuscript.  When  this  occurs  during  'the  perusal  of  a  work  ot 
known  authority  and  established  fame,  we  honestly  lay  the  limit 
on  our  own  deficiency,  or  on  the  unfitness  of  our  present  mood  . 
but  when  it  is  a  contemporary  production,  over  which  we  have 
been  nodding,  it  is  far  more  .pleasant  to  pronounce  it  insufferably 
dull  and  obscure.  Indeed,  as  charity  begins  at  home,  it  would 
be  unreasonable  to  expect  that  a  reader  should  charge  himself 
with  lack  of  intellect,  when  the  effect  may  be  equally  well  ac 
counted  for  by  declaring  the  author  unintelligible  ;  or  that  he 
should  accuse  his  own  inattention,  when  by  half  a  dozen  phrases 


GO  THE    FKIEND. 

of  abuse,  as  "heavy  stuff,  metaphysical  jargon,"  &c.,  he  can  at 
once  excuse  his  laziness,  and  gratify  his  pride,  scorn,  and  envy. 
To  similar  impulses  we  must  attribute  the  praises  of  a  true  mod 
ern  reader,  when  he  meets  with  a  work  in  the  true  modern 
taste  :  namely,  either  in  skipping,  unconnected,  short-winded, 
asthmatic  sentences,  as  easy  to  be  understood  as  impossible  to 
be  remembered,  in  which  the  merest  common-place  acquires  a 
momentary  poignancy,  a  petty  titillating  sting,  from  affected  point 
and  wilful  antithesis  ;  or  else  in  strutting  and  rounded  periods, 
in  which  the  emptiest  truisms  are  blown  up  into  illustrious  bub 
bles  by  help  of  film  and  inflation.  "  Aye  !"  (quoth  the  delighted 
reader)  "  this  is  sense,  this  is  genius  !  this  I  understand  and  ad 
mire  !  I  have  thought  the  very  same  a  hundred  times  myself!" 
In  other  words,  this  man  has  reminded  me  of  my  own  clever 
ness,  and  therefore  I  admire  him.  Oh  !  for  one  piece  of  egotism 
that  presents  itself  under  its  own  honest  bare  face  of  I  myself  I, 
there  are  fifty  that  steal  out  in  the  mask  of  tu-isms  and  ille-isms  f 
It  has  ever  been  my  opinion,  that  an  excessive  solicitude  to 
avoid  the  use  of  our  first  personal  pronoun,  more  often  has  its 
source  in  conscious  selfishness  than  in  true  self-oblivion.  A  quiet 
observer  of  human  follies  may  often  amuse  or  sadden  his  thoughts 
by  detecting  a  perpetual  feeling  of  purest  egotism  through  a  long 
masquerade  of  disguises,  the  half  of  which,  had  old  Proteus  been 
master  of  as  many,  would  have  wearied  out  the  patience  of 
Menelaus.  I  say,  the  patience  only  :  for  it  wrould  ask  more  than 
the  simplicity  of  Polypheme,  with  his  one  eye  extinguished,  to 
be  deceived  by  so  poor  a  repetition  of  Nobody.  Yet  I  can  with 
strictest  truth  assure  my  readers  that  with  a  pleasure  combined 
with  a  sense  of  weariness,  I  see  the  nigh  approach  of  that  point 
of  my  labors,  in  which  I  can  convey  my  opinions  and  the  work 
ings  of  my  heart,  without  reminding  the  reader  obtrusively  of 
myself.  But  the  frequency  with  which  I  have  spoken  in  my 
own  person,  recalls  my  apprehensions  to  the  second  danger,  which 
it  was  rny  hope  to  guard  against  ;  the  probable  charge  of  arro 
gance,  or  presumption,  both  for  daring  to  dissent  from  the  opin 
ions  of  great  authorities,  and,  in  my  following  numbers  perhaps, 
from  the  general  opinion  concerning  the  true  value  of  certain 
authorities  deemed  great.  The  word  presumption,  I  appropriate 
to  the  internal  feeling,  and  arrogance  to  the  way  and  manner  of 
outwardly  expressing  ourselves. 


ESSAY    IV.  37 

As  no  man  can  rightfully  be  condemned  without  reference  to 
some  definite  law,  by  the  knowledge  of  which  he  might  have 
avoided  the  given  fault,  it  is  necessary  so  to  defme^the  constitu 
ent  qualities  and  conditions  of  arrogance,  that  a  reason  may  be 
assignable  why  we  pronounce  one  man  guilty  and  acquit  another. 
For  merely  to  call  a  person  arrogant  or  most  arrogant,  can  con 
vict  no  one  of  the  vice  except  perhaps  the  accuser.  I  remember, 
when  a  young  man  who  had  left  his  books  and  a  glass  of  water 
lo  join  a  convivial  party,  each  of  whom  had  nearly  finished  his 
second  bottle,  Avas  pronounced  very  drunk  by  the  whole  party — 
he  looked  so  strange  and  pale  !  Many  a  man,  who  has  contrived 
to  hide  his  ruling  passion  or  predominant  defect  from  himself, 
will  betray  the  same  to  dispassionate  observers,  by  his  proneness 
on  all  occasions  to  suspect  or  accuse  others  of  it.  Now  arrogance 
and  presumption,  like  all  other  moral  qualities,  must  be  shown 
by  some  act  or  conduct  :  and  this  too  must  be  an  act  that  im 
plies,  if  not  an  immediate  concurrence  of  the  will,  yet  some 
faulty  constitution  of  the  moral  habits.  For  all  criminality  sup 
poses  its  essentials  to  have  been  within  the  power  of  the  agent. 
Either,  therefore,  the  facts  adduced  do  of  themselves  convey 
the  whole  proof  of  the  charge,  and  the  question  rests  on  the  truth 
or  accuracy  with  which  they  have  been  stated  ;  or  they  acquire 
their  character  from  the  circumstances.  I  have  looked  into  a 
ponderous  review  of  the  corpuscular  philosophy  by  a  Sicilian  Jes 
uit,  in  which  the  acrimonious  Father  frequently  expresses  his 
doubt,  whether  he  should  pronounce  Boyle  or  Newton  more  im 
pious  than  presumptuous,  or  more  presumptuous  than  impious. 
They  had  both  attacked  the  reigning  opinions  on  most  important 
subjects,  opinions  sanctioned  by  the  greatest  names  of  antiquity, 
and  by  the  general  suffrage  of  their  learned  contemporaries  or 
immediate  predecessors.  Locke  was  assailed  with  a  full  cry 
for  his  presumption  in  having  deserted  the  philosophical  system 
at  that  time  generally  received  by  the  universities  of  Europe  ; 
and  of  late  years  Dr.  Priestley  bestowed  the  epithets  of  arrogant 
and  insolent  on  Reid,  Beattie,  &c.,  for  presuming  to  arraign 
certain  opinions  of  Mr.  Locke,  himself  repaid  in  kind  by  many 
of  his  own  countrymen  for  his  theological  novelties.  It  will 
scarcely  be  affirmed,  that  these  accusations  were  all  of  them  just, 
or  that  any  of  them  were  fit  or  courteous.  Must  we  therefore 
say,  that  in  order  to  avow  doubt  or  disbelief  of  a  popular  persua- 


38  THE    FRIEND. 

sion  without  arrogance,  it  is  required  that  the  dissentient  should 
know  himself  to  possess  the  genius,  and  foreknow  that  he  should 
acquire  the  reputation,  of  Locke,  Newton,  Boyle,  or  even  of  a 
Reid  or  Beattie  ?  But  as  this  knowledge  and  prescience  are 
impossible  in  the  strict  sense  of  the  words,  and  could  mean  no 
more  than  a  strong  inward  conviction,  it  is  manifest  that  such  a 
rule,  if  it  were  universally  established,  would  encourage  the  pre 
sumptuous,  and  condemn  modest  and  humble  minds  alone  to 
silence.  And  as  this  silence  could  not  acquit  the  individual's 
own  mind  of  presumption,  unless  it  were  accompanied  by  con 
scious  acquiescence  ;  modesty  itself  must  become  an  inert  quality, 
which  even  in  private  society  never  displays  its  charms  more 
unequivocally  than  in  its  mode  of  reconciling  moral  deference 
with  intellectual  courage,  and  general  diffidence  with  sincerity 
in  the  avowal  of  the  particular  conviction. 

We  must  seek  then  elsewhere  for  the  true  marks,  by  which 
presumption  or  arrogance  may  be  detected,  and  on  which  the 
charge  may  be  grounded  with  little  hazard  of  mistake  or  injus 
tice.  And  as  I  confine  my  present  observations  to  literature,  I 
deem  such  criteria  neither  difficult  to  determine  nor  to  apply. 
The  first  mark,  as  it  appears  to  me,  is  a  frequent  bare  assertion 
of  opinions  not  generally  received,  without  condescending  to  pre 
fix  or  annex  the  facts  arid  reasons  on  which  such  opinions  were 
formed  ;  especially  if  this  absence  of  logical  courtesy  is  supplied 
by  contemptuous  or  abusive  treatment  of  such  as  happen  to  doubt 
of,  or  oppose,  the  decisive  ipsc  dixi.  But  to  assert,  however 
nakedly,  that  a  passage  in  a  lewd  novel,  in  which  the  Sacred 
Writings  are  denounced  as  more  likely  to  pollute  the  young  and 
innocent  mind  than  a  romance  notorious  for  its  indecency — to  as 
sert,  I  say,  that  such  a  passage  argues  equal  impudence  and 
ignorance  in  its  author,  at  the  time  of  writing  and  publishing 
it — this  is  not  arrogance  ;  although  to  a  vast  majority  of  the 
decent  part  of  our  countrymen  it  would  be  superfluous  as  a  truism, 
if  it  were  exclusively  an  author's  business  to  convey  or  revive 
knowledge,  and  not  sometimes  his  duty  to  awaken  the  indigna 
tion  of  his  reader  by  the  expression  of  his  own. 

A  second  species  of  this  unamiable  quality,  which  has  been 
often  distinguished  by  the  name  of  Warburtonian  arrogance,  be 
trays  itself,  not  as  in  the  former,  by  proud  or  petulant  omission  of 
proof  or  argument,  but  by  the  habit  of  ascribing  weakness  of  in- 


ESSAY    IV.  39 

tellect,  or  want  of  taste  and  sensibility,  or  hardness  of  heart,  or 
corruption  of  moral  principle,  to  all  who  deny  the  truth  of  the 
doctrine,  or  the  sufficiency  of  the  evidence,  or  the  fairness  of  the 
reasoning  adduced  in  its  ^support.  This  is  indeed  not  essentially 
different  from  the  first,  but  assumes  a  separate  character  from  its 
accompaniments  :  for  though  both  the  doctrine  and  its  proofs 
may  have  been  legitimately  supplied  by  the  understanding,  yet 
tho*bitterness  of  personal  crimination  will  resolve  itself  into  naked 
assertion.  We  are,  therefore,  authorized  by  experience,  and  justi 
fied  on  the  principle  of  self-defence  and  by  the  law  of  fair  retalia 
tion,  in  attributing  it  to  a  vicious  temper  arrogant  from  irritability, 
or  irritable  from  arrogance.  This  learned  arrogance  admits  of 
many  gradations,  and  is  aggravated  or  palliated,  accordingly  as 
the  point  in  dispute  has  been  more  or  less  controverted,  as  the 
reasoning  bears  a  smaller  or  greater  proportion  to  the  virulence 
of  the  personal  detraction,  and  as  the  person  or  parties,  who  are 
the  objects  of  it,  are  more  or  less  respected,  more  or  less  worthy 
of  respect.*  + 

Lastly,  it  must  be  admitted  as  a  just  imputation  of  presumption 

*  Had  the  author  of  the  Divine  Legation  of  Moses  more  skilfully  appro 
priated  his  coarse  eloquence  of  abuse,  his  customary  assurances  of  the 
idiocy,  both  in  head  and  heart,  of  all  his  opponents ;  if  he  had  employed 
those  vigorous  arguments  of  his  own  vehement  humor  in  the  defence  of 
truths  acknowledged  and  reverenced  by  learned  men  in  general ;  or  if  he 
had  confined  them  to  the  names  of  Chubb,  Woolston,  and  other  precursors 
of  Thomas  Paine ;  we  should  perhaps  still  characterize  his  mode  of  con 
troversy  bv  its  rude  violence,  but  not  so  often  have  heard  .his  name  used, 
even  by  those  who  have  never  read  his  writings,  as  a  proverbial  expression 
for  learned  arrogance.  But  when  a  novel  and  doubtful  hypothesis  of  his 
own  formation  was  the  citadel  to  be  defended,  and  his  mephitic  hand- 
granados  were  thrown  with  the  fury  of  lawless  despotism  at  the  fair  repu 
tation  of  a  Sykes  and  a  Lardner,-we  not  only  confirm  the  verdict  of  his  in 
dependent  contemporaries,  but  cease  to  wonder,  that  arrogance  should 
render  men  objects  of  contempt  in  many,  and  of  aversion  in  all,  instances, 
when  it  was  capable  of  hurrying  a  Christian  teacher  of  equal  talents  and 
learning  into  a  slanderous  vulgarity,  which  escapes  our  disgust  only  when 
we  see  the  writer's  own  reputation  the  sole  victim.  But  throughout  his 
great  work,  and  the  pamphlets  in  which  he  supported  it,  he  always  seems 
to  write  as  if  he  had  deemed  it  a  duty  of  decorum  to  publish  his  fancies  on 
the  Mosaic  Law  as  the  Law  itself  was  delivered,  that  is,  in  thunders  and 
lightnings :  or  as  if  he  had  applied  to  his  own  book  instead  of  the  sacred 
mount,  the  menace, — There  shall  not  a  hand  touch  it  but  he  shall  surely  be 
stoned  or  shot  through. 


40  THE    FRIEND. 

when  an  individual  obtrudes  on  the  public  eye,  with  all  the  high 
pretensions  of  originality,  opinions  and  observations,  in  regard  to 
which  he  must  plead  wilful  ignorance  in  order  to  be  acquitted  of 
dishonest  plagiarism.  On  the  same  seat  must  the  writer  be 
placed,  who  in  a  disquisition  on  any  important  subject  proves,  by 
falsehoods  either  of  omission  or  of  positive  error,  that  he  has  neg 
lected  to  possess  himself,  not  only  of  the  information  requisite  for 
this  particular  subject ;  but  even  of  those  acquirements,  and. I  hat 
general  knowledge,  which  could  alone  authorize  him  to  com 
mence  a  public  instructor.  This  is  an  office  which  can  not  be 
procured  gratis.  The  industry,  necessary  for  the  due  exercise  of 
its  functions,  is  its  purchase-money ;  and  the  absence  or  in 
sufficiency  of  the  same  is  so  far  a  species  of  dishonesty,  and  im 
plies  a  presumption  in  the  literal  as  well  as  the  ordinary  sense  of 
the  word.  He  has  taken  a  thing  before  he  had  acquired  any 
right  or  title  thereto. 

If  in  addition  to  this  un  fitness  which  every  man  possesses  the 
means  of  ascertaining,  his  aim  should  be  to  unsettle  a  general 
belief  closely  connected  with  public  and  private  quiet ;  and  if  his 
language  and  manner  be  avowedly  calculated  for  the  illiterate, 
and  perhaps  licentious,  part  of  his  countrymen  ;  disgusting  as  his 
presumption  must  appear,  it  is  yet  lost  or  evanescent  in  the  close 
neighborhood  of  his  guilt.  That  Hobbes  translated  Homer  into 
English  verse  and  published  his  translation,  furnishes  no  positive 
evidence  of  his  self-conceit,  though  it  implies  a  great  lack  of  self- 
knowledge  and  of  acquaintance  with  the  nature  of  poetry.*'  A 
strong  wish  often  imposes  itself  on  the  mind  for  an  actual  power  : 
the  mistake  is  favored  by  the  innocent  pleasure  derived  from  the 
exercise  of  versification,  perhaps  by  the  approbation  of  intimates  ; 
and  the  candidate  asks  from  more  impartial  readers  that  sentence, 
which  nature  has  not  enabled  him  to  anticipate.  But  when  the 
philosopher  of  Malmesbury  waged  war  with  "Wallis  and  the 
fundamental  truths  of  pure  geometry,  every  instance  of  his  gross 
ignorance  and  utter  misconception  of  the  very  elements  of  the 
science  he  proposed  to  confute,  furnished  an  unanswerable  fact  in 

*  At  the  time  I  wrote  this  essay,  and  indeed  till  the  present  mouth, 
December,  1818, 1  had  never  seen  Hobbes'  translation  of  the  Odyssey,  which, 
I  now  find,  is  by  no  means  to  be  spoken  of  contemptuously.  It  is  doubtless 
as  much  too  ballud-like,  as  the  later  versions  are  too  epic ;  but  still,  on  the 
whole,  it  leaves  a  much  truer  impression  of  the  original. 


ESSAY    IV.  41 

proof  of  his  high  presumption  ;  and  the  confident  and  insulting 
language  of  the  attack  leaves  the  judicious  reader  in  as  little 
doubt  of  his  gross  arrogance.  An  illiterate  mechanic,  who  mis 
taking  some  disturbance  of  his  nerves  for  a  miraculous  call  pro 
ceeds  alone  to  convert  a  trifle  of  savages,  whose  language  he  can 
have  no  natural  means  of  acquiring,  may  have  been  misled  by 
impulses  very  different  from  those  %  of  high  sell-opinion  ;  but  the 
illiterate  perpetrator  of  the  '  Age  of  Reason'  must  have  had  his 
very  conscience  stupefied  by  the  habitual  intoxication  of  presump 
tuous  arrogance,  and  his  common  sense  over-clouded  by  the  va 
pors  from  his  heart.  '*• 

As  long  therefore  as  I  obtrude  no  unsupported  assertions  on 
my  readers  ;  and  as  long  as  I  state  my  opinions  and  the  evidence 
which  induced  or  compelled  me  to  adopt  them,  with  calmness 
and  that  diffidence  in  myself,  which  is  by  no  means  incompatible 
with  a  firm  belief  in  the  justness  of  the  opinions  themselves  ; 
while  I  attack  no  man's  private  life  from  any  cause,  and  detract 
from  no  man's  honors  in  his  public  character,  from  the  truth  of 
his  doctrines,  or  the  merits  of  his  compositions,  without  detailing 
all  my  reasons  and  resting  the  result  solely  on  the  arguments  ad 
duced  ;  while  I  moreover  explain  fully  the  motives  of  duty,  which 
influenced  me  in  resolving  to  institute  such  investigation ;  while 
I  confine  all  asperity  of  censure,  and  all  expressions  of  contempt, 
to  gross  violations  of  truth,  honor,  and  decency,  to  the  base  cor- 
rupter  and  the  detected  slanderer  ;  while  I  write  on  no  subject, 
which  I  have  not  studied  with  my  best  attention,  on  no  subject 
which. my  education  and  acquirements  have  incapacitated  me 
from  properly  understanding  ;  and  above  all  while  I  approve 
myself,  alike  in  praise  and  in  blame,  in  close  reasoning  and  in 
impassioned  declamation,  a  steady  friend  to  the  two  best  and 
surest  friends  of  all  men,  truth  and  honesty  ;  I  will  not  fear  an 
accusation  of  either  presumption  or  arrogance  from  the  good  and 
the  wise,  I  shall  pity  it  from  the  weak,  and  welcome  it  from  the 
wicked. 


. 


ESSAY   V. 


In  fodem  pcctore  nullam  est  honestorum  turpiumque  consortium  i  et  cogi- 
tare  optima  simul  ac  deterrima  non  in<i<j!s  cut  unins  anhni    quain  ejuxdan 
tK  boii.um  esse  ac  malum.  QUJNCTILIAN.* 


There  is  uo  fellowship  of  honor  and  baseness  in  the  same  breast;  and  to 
combine  the  best  and  the  worst  designs  is  uo  more  possible  in  one  mind, 
than  it  is  for  the  same  man  to  be  at  the  same  instant  virtuous  and  vicious. 

Coynitio  veritatis  omnia  falsa,  xi  tnodn  profcrantur,  ctiam  qua:  prints  inau- 
dita  erant,  et  dijudiCare  et  subvertere  idoncu  cKt.  AUGUSTIX. 

A  knowledge  of  the  truth  is  equal  to  the  task  both  of  discerning  and  of 
confuting  all  false  assertions  and  erroneous  arguments,  though  never  before 
met  with,  if  only  they  may  freely  be  brought  forward. 

I  HAVE  said,  that  my  very  system  compels  me  to  make  every 
fair  appeal  to  the  feeling's,  the  imagination,  and  even  the  fancy. 
If  these  are  to  be  withholden  from  the  service  of  truth,  virtue, 
and  happiness,  to  what  purpose  were  they  given  ?  In  whose 
service  are  they  retained  ?  I  have  indeed  considered  the  dispro 
portion  of  human  passions  to  their  ordinary  objects  among  the 
strongest  internal  evidence  of  our  future  destination,  and  the  at 
tempt  to  restore  them  to  their  rightful  claimants,  the  most  impe 
rious  duty  and  the  noblest  task  of  genius.  The  verbal  enunciation 
of  this  master  truth  could  scarcely  be  new  to  rne  at  any  period  of 
my  life  since  earliest  youth  ;  but  I  well  remember  the  particular 
time,  when  the  \vords  first  became  more  than  words  to  me,  when 
they  incorporated  with  a  living  conviction,  and  took  their  place 
among  the  realities  of  my  being.  On  some  wide  common  or  open 
heath,  peopled  with  ant-hills,  during  some  one  of  the  gray  cloudy 
days  of  late  autumn,  many  of  my  readers  may  have  noticed  the  ef 
fect  of  a  sudden  and  momentary  flash  of  sunshine  on  all  the  countless 

*  XII.  1.  4.—  Ed. 


ESSAY    V.  43 

little  animals  within  his  view,  aware  too  that  the  self-same  influ 
ence  was  darted  co-instantaneously  over  all  their  swarming  cities 
as  far  as  his  eye  could  reach  ;  may  have  observed,  with  what  a 
kindly  force  the  gleam  stirs  and  quickens  them  all,  and  will  have 
experienced  no  unpleasurable  shock  of  feeling  in  seeing  myriads 
of  myriads  of  living  and  sentient  beings  united  at  the  same  mo 
ment  in  one  gay  sensation,  one  joyous  activity  !  But  awful  in 
deed  is  the  same  appearance  in  a  multitude  of  rational  beings, 
our  fellow-men,  in  whom  too  the  effect  is  produced  not  so  much 
by  the  external  occasion  as  from  the  active  quality  of  their  .own 
thoughts.  I  had  walked  from  Gottingen  in  the  year  1799,  to 
witness  the  arrival  of  the  Queen  of  Prussia,  on  her  visit  to  the 
Baron  Von  Hartzberg's  seat,  five  miles  from  the  University.  The 
spacious  outer  court  of  the  palace  was  crowded  with  men  and  wo 
men,  a  sea  of  heads,  with  a  number  of  children  rising  out  of  it 
from  their  fathers'  shoulders.  After  a  buzz  of  two  hours'  expecta 
tion,  the  avant-courier  rode  at  full  speed  into  the  court.  At  the 
loud  cracks  of  his  long  whip  and  the  trampling  of  his  horse's 
hoofs,  the  universal  shock  and  thrill  of  emotion — I  have  not  lan 
guage  to  convey  it — expressed  as  it  was  in  such  manifold  looks, 
gestures,  and  attitudes,  yet  with  one  and  the  same  feeling  in  the 
eyes  of  all  !  Recovering  from  the  first  inevitable  contagion  of 
sympathy,  I  involuntarily  exclaimed,  though  in  a  language  to 
myself  alone  intelligible,  "  0  man  !  ever  nobler  than  thy  circum 
stances  !  Spread  but  the  mist  of  obscure  feeling  over  any  form, 
and  even  a  woman  incapable  of  blessing  or  of  injuring  thee  shall 
be  welcomed  with  an  intensity  of  emotion  adequate  to  the  recep 
tion  of  the  Redeemer  of  the  world  !" 

To  a  creature  so  highly,  so  fearfully  gifted, — who,  alienated  as 
he  is  by  a  sorcery  scarcely  less  mysterious  than  the  nature  on 
which  it  is  exercis^fl,  yet,  like  the  fabled  son  of  Jove  in  the  evil 
day  of  his  sensual  bewitchment,  lifts  the  spindles  and  distaffs  of 
Omphale  with  the  arm  of  a  giant — to  such  a  creature  truth  is 
self-restoration  :  for  that  which  is  the  correlative  of  truth,  the  ex 
istence  of  absolute  life,  is  the  only  object  which  can  attract  to 
ward  it  the  whole  depth  and  mass  of  his  fluctuating  being,  and 
alone* therefore  can  unite  calmness  with  elevation.  But  it  must 

truth  without  alloy  and  unsophisticated.  It  is  by  the  agency 
of  indistinct  conceptions,  as  the  counterfeits  of  the  ideal  and  tran- 
scendant,  that  evil  and  vanity  exercise  their  tyranny  on  the  feel- 


44  THE    FRIEND. 

ings  of  man.  The  powers  of  darkness  are  politic  if  not  wise  ;  but 
surely  nothing  can  be  more  irrational  in  the  pretended  children 
of  light,  than  to  enlist  themselves  under  the  banners  of  truth,  and 
yet  rest  their  hopes  on  an  alliance  with  delusion. 

As  one  among  the  numerous  artifices,  by  which  austere  truths 
are  to  be  softened  down  into  palatable  falsehoods,  and  virtue  and 
vice,  like  the  atoms  of  Epicurus,  to  receive  that  insensible  clina- 
men  which  is  to  make  them  meet  each  other  half-way,  I  have 
an  especial  dislike  to  the  expression,  pious  frauds.  Piety  indeed 
shrinks  from  the  very  phrase,  as  an  attempt  to  mix  poison  with 
the  cup  of  blessing  :  while  the  expediency  of  the  measures  which 
the  words  were  intended  to  recommend  or  palliate,  appears  more 
and  more  suspicious,  as  the  range  of  our  experience  widens,  and  our 
acquaintance  with  the  records  of  history  becomes  more  extensive 
and  accurate.  One  of  the  most  seductive  arguments  of  infidelity 
grounds  itself  on  the  numerous  passages  in  the  works  of  the  Chris 
tian  Fathers,  asserting  the  lawfulness  of  deceit  for  a  good  purpose. 
For  how  can  we  rely  on  their  testimony  concerning  the  supernat 
ural  facts  ?  That  the  Fathers  held,  almost  without  exception, 
that  "  wholly  without  breach  of  duty  it  is  allowed  to  the  teach 
ers  and  heads  of  the  Christian  Church  to  employ  artifices,  to  in 
termix  falsehoods  with  truths,  and  especially  to  deceive  the  ene 
mies  of  the  faith,  provided  only  they  hereby  serve  the  interests  of 
truth  and  the  advantage  of  mankind,"*  is  the  unwilling  confes 
sion  of  RIBOF.  St.  Jerome,  as  is  shown  by  the  citations  of  this 
learned  theologian,  boldly  attributes  this  management — -fahitatem 
dispensativam — even  to  the  Apostles  themselves.  Bat  why  speak 
I  of  the  advantage  given  to  the  opponents  of  Christianity  ?  Alas ! 

*  De  ceconom.  Patrum.  Intcgrum  oninlno  doctor  i  bus  et  ccetus  Christiani 
antistitibuK  essc,  ut  dolo*  ver sent,  falsa ver is  intermiscvbnt,  et  imprimis  religi- 
oni*  hoKtes  fallant.  dummodo  veritatis  commod's  ct  utilitati  inxerviant. — I 
trust,  I  need  not  add,  that  the  imputation  of  such  principles  of  action  to  the 
first  inspired  propagators  of  Christianity,  is  founded  on  a  gross  misconstruc 
tion  of  those  passages  in  the  writings  of  St.  Paul,  in  which  the  necessity  of 
employing  different  arguments  to  men  of  different  capacities  and  prejudices, 
is  supposed  and  acceded  to.  In  other  words,  St.  Paul  strove  to  speak  in 
telligibly,  willingly  sacrificed  indifferent  things  to  matters  of  importance, 
and  acted  courteously  as  a  man,  in  order  to  win  attention  as  an  Apostle!  A 
traveller  prefers  for  daily  use  the  coin  of  the  nation  through  which  he  is 
passing,  to  bullion  or  the  mintage  of  his  own  country  :  and  is  this  to  justify 
a  succeeding  traveller  in  the  use  of  counterfeit  coin  ? 


ESSAY    V.  45 

to  this  doctrine  chiefly,  and  to  the  practices  derived  from  it,  we 
must  attribute  the  utter  corruption  of  the  religion  itself  for  so 
many  ages,  and  even  now  over  so  large  a  portion  of  the  civilized 
world.  By  a  system  of  accommodating  truth  to  falsehood,  the 
pastors  of  the  Church  gradually  changed  the  life  and  light  of  the 
Gospel  into  the  very  superstitions  which  they  were  commissioned 
to  disperse,  and  thus  paganized  Christianity  in  order  to  christen 
Paganism.  At  this  very  hour  Europe  groans  and  bleeds  in  con 
sequence. 

!  So  much  in  proof  and  exemplification  of  the  probable  expedi 
ency  of  pious  deception,  as  suggested  by  its  known  and  recorded 
consequences.  An  honest  man,  however,  possesses  a  clearer 
light  than  that  of  history.  He  knows,  that  by  sacrificing  the 
law  of  his  reason  to  the  maxim  of  pretended  prudence,  he  pur 
chases  the  sword  with  the  loss  of  the  arm  that  is  to  wield  it. 
The  duties  which  we  owe  to  our  own  moral  being,  are  the  ground 
and  condition  of  all  other  duties  ;  and  to  set  our  nature  at  strife 
with  itself  for  a  good  purpose,  implies  the  same  sort  of  prudence, 
as  a  priest  of  Diana  would  have  manifested,  who  should  have 
proposed  to  dig  up  the  celebrated  charcoal  foundations  of  the 
mighty  temple  of  Ephesus,  in  order  to  furnish  fuel  for  the  burnt- 
oflerings  on  its  altars.  Truth,  virtue,  and  happiness,  may  be 
distinguished  from  each  other,  but  can  not  be  divided.  They 
subsist  by  a  mutual  co-inherence,  which  gives  a  shadow  of  di 
vinity  even  to  our  human  nature.  Will  ye  speak  wickedly  for 
God  ;  and  talk  deceitfully  for  him  ?*  is  a  searching  question, 
which  most  affectingly  represents  the  grief  and  impatience  of 
an  uncorrupted  mind  at  perceiving  a  good  cause  defended  by  ill 
means  :  and  assuredly  if  any  temptation  can  provoke  a  well- 
regulated  temper  to  intolerance,  it  is  the  shameless  assertion, 
that  truth  and  falsehood  are  indifferent  in  their  own  natures ; 
that  the  former  is  as  often  injurious  (and  therefore  criminal)  as 
the  latter,  and  the  latter  on  many  occasions  as  beneficial  (and 
consequently  meritorious)  as  the  former. 

I  feel  it  incumbent  on  me,  therefore,  to  place  immediately  be 
fore  my  readers  in  the  fullest  and  clearest  light,  the  whole  ques 
tion  of  moral  obligation  respecting  the  communication  of  truth, 
its  extent  and  conditions.  I  would  fain  obviate  all  apprehen 
sions  either  of  my  incaution  on  the  one  hand,  or  of  any  insincere 
*Job  xiii.  7.— Ed. 


46  THE    FKIKND. 

reserve  on  the  other,  by  proving  that  the  more  strictly  we  ad 
here  to  the  letter  of  the  moral  law  in  this  respect,  the  more  com 
pletely  shall  we  reconcile  that  law  with  prudence  ;  thus  securing 
a  purity  in  the  principle  without  mischief  from  the  practice.  I 
would  not,  1  could  not  dare,  address  my  countrymen  as  a  friend, 
if  I  might  not  justify  the  assumption  of  that  sacred  title  by  more 
than  mere  veracity,  by  open-heartedness.  Pleasure,  most  often 
delusive,  may  be  born  of  delusion.  Pleasure,  herself  a  sorceress, 
may  pitch  her  tents  on  enchanted  ground.  But  happiness  (or,  to 
use  a  far  more  accurate  as  well  as  more  comprehensive  term, 
solid  well-being)  can  be  built  on  virtue  alone,  and  must  of  neces 
sity  have  truth  lor  its  foundation.  Add,  too,  the  known  fact  that 
the  meanest  of  men  feels  himself  insulted  by  an  unsuccessful  at 
tempt  to  deceive  him  ;  and  hates  and  despises  the  man  who  has 
attempted  it.  What  place  then  is  left  in  the  heart  for  virtue  to 
build  on,  if  in  any  case  we  may  dare  practise  on  others  what  we 
should  feel  as  a  cruel  and  contemptuous  wrong  in  our  own  per 
sons  ?  Every  parent  possesses  the  opportunity  of  observing  how 
deeply  children  resent  the  injury  of  a  delusion ;  and  if  men 
laugh  at  the  falsehoods  that  were  imposed  on  themselves  during 
their  childhood,  it  is  because  they  are  not  good  and  wise  enough 
to  contemplate  the  past  in  the  present,  and  so  to  produce  by  a 
virtuous  and  thoughtful  sensibility  that  continuity  in  their  self- 
consciousness,  which  nature  has  made  the  law  of  their  animal 
life.  Ingratitude,  sensuality,  and  hardness  of  heart,  all  flow  from 
this  source.  Men  are  ungrateful  to  others  only  when  they  have 
ceased  to  look  back  on  their  former  selves  with  joy  and  tender 
ness.  They  exist  in  fragments.  Annihilated  as  to  the  past,  they 
are  dead  to  the  future,  or  seek  for  the  proofs  of  it  everywhere, 
only  not  (where  alone  they  can  be  found)  in  themselves.  A 
contemporary  poet  has  expressed  and  illustrated  this  sentiment 
with  equal  fineness  of  thought  and  tenderness  of  feeling  : — 

My  heart  leaps  up  when  I  behold 

A  rainbow  in  the  sky  ! 
So  was  it,  when  my  life  began  ; 
So  is  it  now  I  am  a  man ; 
So  let  it  be,  when  I  grow  old, 

Or  let  me  die. 
The  child  is  father  of  the  man, 


ESSAY    V.  47 

And  I  would  wish  ray  days  to  be 
Bound  each  to  each  by  natural  piety.* 

WORDSWORIH. 

Alas  !  the  pernicious  influence  of  this  lax  morality  extends 
from  the  nursery  and  the  school  to  the  cabinet  and  senate.  It  is  a 
common  weakness  with  men  in  power,  who  have  used  dissimu 
lation  successfully,  to  form  a  passion  for  the  use  of  it,  dupes  to 
the  love  of  duping  !  A  pride  is  flattered  by  these  lies.  He  who 
fancies  that  he  must  be  perpetually  stooping  down  to  the  preju 
dices  of  his  fellow-creatures,  is  perpetually  reminding  and  re 
assuring  himself  of  his  own  vast  superiority  to  them.  But  no  real 
greatness  can  long  co-exist  with  deceit.  The  whole  faculties  of 
man  must  be  exerted  in  order  to  noble  energies  ;  and  he  who  is 
not  earnestly  sincere,  lives  in  but  half  his  being,  self-muti 
lated,  self-paralyzed. 

The  latter  part  of  the  proposition,  which  has  drawn  me  into 
this  discussion,  that,  I  mean,  in  Avhich  the  morality  of  intentional 
falsehood  is  asserted,  may  safely  be  trusted  to  the  reader's  own 
moral  sense.  Is  it  a  groundless  apprehension,  that  the  patrons 
and  admirers  of  such  publications  may  receive  the  punishment 
of  their  indiscretion  in  the  conduct  of  their  sons  and  daughters  ? 
The  suspicion  of  Methodism  must  be  expected  by  every  man  of 
rank  and  fortune,  who  carries  his  examination  respecting  the 
books  which  are  to  lie  on  his  breakfast-table,  farther  than  to 
their  freedom  from  gross  verbal  indecencies,  and  broad  avowals 
of  Atheism  in  the  title-page.  For  the  existence  of  an  intelligent 

*  I  am  informed,  that  these  very  lines  have  been  cited,  as  a  specimen 
of  despicable  puerility.  So  much  the  worse  for  the  citer.  Not  willingly 
in  his  presence  would  I  behold  the  sun  setting  behind  our  mountains,  or 
listen  to  a  tale  of  distress  or  virtue;  I  should  be  ashamed  of  the  quiet 
tear  on  my  own  cheek.  But  let  the  dead  bury  the  dead !  The  poet  sang 
for  the  living.  Of  what  value  indeed,  to  a  sane  mind,  are  the  likings 
or  dislikings  of  one  man,  grounded  on  the  mere  assertions  of  another  ? 
Opinions  formed  from  opinions — what  are  they,  but  clouds  sailing  under 
clouds,  which  impress  shadows  upon  shadows  ? 

Fungum  pelle  procul,  jubeo  ;  nam  quid  mihi  fungo  ? 
Conveniunt  stomacho  non  minus  ista  suo. 

I  was  always  pleased  with  the  motto  placed  under  the  figure  of  the 
rosemary  in  old  herbals : — 

Apagc,  sus  I    Hand  tibi  spiro. 


48  THE    FRIEND. 

First  Cause  may  be  ridiculed  in  the  notes  of  one  poem,  or  placed 
doubtfully  as  one  of  two  or  three  possible  hypotheses,  in  the  very 
opening  of  another  poem,  and  both  be  considered  as  works  of 
safe  promiscuous  reading  virginibus  puerisque  :  and  this,  too,  by 
many  a  father  of  a  family,  who  would  hold  himself  highly  culpable 
in  permitting  his  child  to  form  habits  of  familiar  acquaintance 
with  a  person  of  loose  habits,  and  think  it  even  criminal  to  re 
ceive  into  his  house  a  private  tutor  without  a  previous  inquiry 
concerning  his  opinions  and  principles,  as  well  as  his  manners 
and  outward  conduct.  How  little  I  am  an  enemy  to  free  in 
quiry  of  the  boldest  kind,  and  in  which  the  authors  have  differed 
the  most  widely  from  my  own  convictions  arid  the  general  faith, 
provided  only,  the  inquiry  be  conducted  with  that  seriousness, 
which  naturally  accompanies  the  love  of  truth,  and  be  evidently 
intended  for  the  perusal  of  those  only,  who  may  be  presumed 
capable  of  weighing  the  arguments, — I  shall  have  abundant  oc 
casion  of  proving  in  the  course  of  this  work.  Quin  ipsa  pliiloso- 
phia  talibus  e  disputationibus  non  nisi  bencjicium  recipit.  Nam- 
si  vera  proponit  homo  ingeniosus  veritatisque  amans,  nova  ad 
earn  accessio  Jiet :  sin  falsa,  refutatione  eoriim  priores  tanto 
magis  stabilientur  * 

The  assertion,  that  truth  is  often  no  less  dangerous  than  false 
hood,  sounds  less  offensively  at  the  first  hearing,  only  because  it 
hides  its  deformity  in  an  equivocation,  or  double  meaning  of  the 
word  truth.  What  may  be  rightly  affirmed  of  truth,  used  as 
synonymous  with  verbal  accuracy,  is  transferred  to  it  in  its  higher 
sense  of  veracity.  By  verbal  truth,  we  mean  no  more  than  the 
correspondence  of  a  given  fact  to .  given  words.  In  moral  truth, 
we  involve  likewise  the  intention  of  the  speaker,  that  his  words 
should  correspond  to  his  thoughts  in  the  sense  in  which  he  ex- 

*  GALILEI,  Syst.  Co*m.  p.  42. — Moreover,  philosophy  itself  can  not  but 
derive  benefit  from  such  discussions.  For  if  a  man  of  genius  and  a  lover  of 
truth  brings  just  positions  before  the  public,  there  is  a  fresh  accession  to 
the  stock  of  philosophic  insight;  but  if  erroneous  positions,  the  former 
truths  will  by  their  confutation  be  established  so  much  the  more  firmly. 

The  original  is  in  the  folloAviug  words : — 

Lafilosofia  medesima  non  pud  se  non  ricever  benefizio  dalle  nostre  dispute  ; 
perc/ie  se  i  nostri  pensieri  saranno  vcri,  nuooi  acquisti  si  saranno  fatti  ;  se 
falsi,  col  nbuttargli,  tnaggiormente  verranno  confermate  le  prime  dottrine. 

Dial.  I  44.  Padov.  1774.— Ed. 


ESSAY    V.  49 

pects  them  to  be  understood  by  others  :  and  in  this  latter  import 
we  are  always  supposed  to  use  the  word,  whenever  we  speak  of 
truth  absolutely,  or  as  a  possible  subject  of  moral  merit  or  de 
merit.  It  is  verbally  true,  that  in  the  sacred  Scriptures  it  is  writ 
ten  :  As  is  the  good,  so  is  the  sinner,  and  he  that  sweareth  as  he 
that  fear eth  an  oath.  A  man  hath  no  better  tiling  under  the 
sun,  than  to  eat,  and  to  drink,  and  to  be  merry.  There  is  one 
event  unto  all :  the  living  know  they  shall  die,  but  the  dead 
know  not  any  tiling,  neitlier  have  they  any  more  a  reward.* 
But  he  who  should  repeat  these  words,  with  this  assurance,  to 
an  ignorant  man  in  the  hour  of  his  temptation,  lingering  at  the 
door  of  the  alehouse,  or  hesitating  as  to  the  testimony  required  of 
him  in  the  court  of  justice,  would,  spite  of  this  verbal  truth,  be  a 
liar,  and  the  murderer  of  his  brother's  conscience.  Veracity, 
therefore,  not  mere  accuracy  ;  to  convey  truth,  not  merely  to  say 
it,  is  the  point  of  duty  in  dispute  :  and  the  only  difficulty  in  the 
mind  of  an  honest  man  arises  from  the  doubt,  whether  more  than 
veracity,  that  is,  the  truth  and  nothing  but  the  truth — is  not 
demanded  of  him  by  the  law  of  conscience  ;  whether  it  does  not 
exact  simplicity  ;  that  is,  the  truth  only,  and  the  whole  truth. 
If  we  can  solve  this  difficulty,  if  we  can  determine  the  conditions 
under  which  the  law  of  universal  reason  commands  the  commu 
nication  of  the  truth  independently  of  consequences,  we  shall  then 
be  enabled  to  judge  whether  there  is  any  such  probability  of  evil 
consequences  from  such  communication,  as  can  justify  the  asser 
tion  of  its  occasional  criminality,  as  can  perplex  us  in  the  con 
ception,  or  disturb  us  in  the  performance,  of  our  duty. 

The  conscience,  or  effective  reason,  commands  the  design  of 
conveying  an  adequate  notion  of  the  thing  spoken  of,  when  this 
is  practicable  :  but  at  all  events  a  right  notion,  or  none  at  all. 
A  schoolmaster  is  under  the  necessity  of  teaching  a  certain  rule 
in  simple  arithmetic  empirically, — (do  so  and  so,  and  the  sum 
will  always  prove  true)  ; — the  necessary  truth  of  the  rule, — that 
is,  that  the  rule  having  been  adhered  to,  the  sum  must  always 
prove  true — requiring  a  knowledge  of  the  higher  mathematics 
for  its  demonstration.  He,  however,  conveys  a  right  notion, 
though  he  can  not  convey  the  adequate  one. 

*  Eccles.  viii.  15  ;  ix.  2,  6.— Ed. 
VOL.  II.  C 


ESSAY  VI. 


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fj£v  TOV  df.^ibv  tivdpa,  /3/laTrre  i  (5e  rbv  piiidiur  (buvsvvTa  m'iv  tTrof  KOL  t~v  Trawl 
Si/fiu.  Xpj)  (5e  Kdipov  fiKTpa  eidzvai'  ao$ii]q  yap  o£rof  opof.  Ei  (5e  o/  ££« 
Kaipov  prjGiv  fiOVCLKrjv  KEirwui-vus  dtiaovaiv,  ov  Trapa  J^ovrai  ev  upyiy 
•yvuprjv,  airLrjv  6'  cxovai  fiupiaf. 

ANAXARCHUS,  apud  Stobajum,  Serm.  XXXIY.* 

General  knowledge  and  ready  talent  may  be  of  very  great  benefit,  but 
they  may  likewise  be  of  very  great  disservice  to  the  possessor.  They  are 
highly  advantageous  to  the  man  of  sound  judgment,  and  dexterous  in  ap- 
plving  them ;  but  they  injure  your  fluent  holder-forth  on  all  subjects  in  all 
companies.  It  is  necessary  to  know  the  measures  of  the  time  and  occasion : 
for  this  is  the  very  boundary  of  wisdom — (that  by  which  it  is  defined,  and 
distinguished  from  mere  ability).  But  he,  who  without  regard  to  the  un- 
fitness  of  the  time  and  the  audience,  will  soar  in  the  high  region  of  his 
fancies  with  his  garland  and  singing  robes  about  him,  will  not  acquire  the 
credit  of  seriousness  amidst  frivolity,  but  will  be  condemned  for  his  silli 
ness,  as  the  greatest  idler  of  the  company,  because  the  most  unseasonable. 

THE  moral  law,  it  has  been  shown,  permits  an  inadequate 
communication  of  unsophisticated  truth,  on  the  condition  that  it 
alone  is  practicable,  and  binds  us  to  silence  when  neither  an  ade 
quate,  nor  even  a  right,  exposition  of  the  truth  is  in  our  power. 
We  must  first  inquire  then, — what  is  necessary  to  constitute,  and 
what  may  allowably  accompany,  a  right  though  inadequate  no 
tion, — and,  secondly,  what  are  the  circumstances,  from  which  we 
may  deduce  the  impracticability  of  conveying  even  a  right  notion  ; 
the  presence  or  absence  of  which  circumstances  it  therefore  be 
comes  our  duty  to  ascertain.  In  answer  to  the  first  question,  the 
conscience  demands  :  1.  That  it  should  be  the  wish  and  design 
of  the  mind  to  convey  the  truth  only  ;  that  if  in  addition  to  the 
negative  loss  implied  in  its  inadequateness,  the  notion  communi 
cated  should  lead  to  any  positive  error,  the  cause  should  lie  in 

*  Edit,  Gaisford.— Ed. 


ESSAY    VI.  51 

the  fault  or  defect  of  the  recipient,  not  of  the  communicator,  whose 
paramount  duty,  whose  inalienable  right,  it  is  to  preserve  his  own 
integrity,*  the  integral  character  of  his  own  moral  being.  Self- 
respect  ;  the  reverence  which  he  owes  to  the  presence  of  human 
ity  in  the  person  of  his  neighbor  ;  the  reverential  upholding  of 
the  faith  of  man  in  man  ;  gratitude  for  the  particular  act  of 
confidence  ;  and  religious  awe  for  the  divine  purposes  in  the  gift 
of  language  ;  are  duties  too  sacred  and  important  to  be  sacrificed 
to  the  guesses  of  an  individual,  concerning  the  advantages  to  be 
gained  by  the  breach  of  them.  2.  It  is  further  required,  that 
the  supposed  error  shall  not  be  such  as  will  pervert  or  materially 
vitiate  the  imperfect  truth,  in  communicating  which  we  had  un 
willingly,  though  not  perhaps  unwittingly,  occasioned  it.  A  bar 
barian  so  instructed  in  the  power  and  intelligence  of  the  infinite 
Being  as  to  be  left  wholly  ignorant  of  his  moral  attributes,  would 
have  acquired  none  but  erroneous  notions  even  of  the  former.  At 
the  very  best,  he  would  gain  only  a  -theory  to  satisfy  his  curiosity 
with  ;  but  more  probably,  would  deduce  the  belief  of  a  Moloch 
or  a  Baal.  For  the  idea  of  an  irresistible,  invisible  Being,  nat 
urally  produces  terror  in  the  mind  of  uninstructed  and  unprotected 
man,  and  with  terror  there  will  be  associated  whatever  has  been 
accustomed  to  excite  it,  anger,  vengeance,  &c.  ;  as  is  proved  by 

*  The  best  and  most  forcible  sense  of  a  word  is  often  that  which  is  con 
tained  in  its  etymology.  The  author  of  the  poems,  the  Synagogue,  fre 
quently  affixed  to  Herbert's  Temple,  gives  the  original  purport  of  the  word 
"  integrity,"  in  the  following  lines  of  the  fourth  stanza  of  the  eighth  poem  :* 

Next  to  sincerity,  remember  still, 

Thou  must  resolve  upon  integrity. 

God  will  have  all  thou  hast,  thy  mind,  thy  will, 

Thy  thoughts,  thy  words,  thy  works. — 

And  again,  after  some  verses  on  constancy  and  humility,  the  poem  con 
cludes  with — 

He  that  desires  to  see 
The  face  of  God,  in  his  religion  must 
Sincere,  entire,  constant,  and  humble  be. 

Having  mentioned  the  name  of  Herbert,  that  model  of  a  man,  a  gentle 
man,  and  a  clergyman,  let  me  add,  that  the  quaintness  of  some  of  his 
thoughts,  not  of  his  diction,  than  which  nothing  can  be  more  pure,  manly, 
and  unaffected,  has  blinded  modern  readers  to  the  great  general  merit  of 
his  poems,  which  are  for  the  most  part  exquisite  in  their  kind. 

*  Church-Porch.— Ed. 


52  THE    FKIEND. 

the  mythology  of  all  barbarous  nations.  This  must  be  the  case 
with  all  organized  truths  ;  the  component  parts  derive  their  sig 
nificance  from  the  idea  of  the  whole.  Bolingbroke  removed  love, 
justice,  and  choice,  from  power  and  intelligence,  and  yet  pre 
tended  to  have  left  unimpaired  the  conviction  of  a  Deity.  He 
might  as  consistently  have  paralyzed  the  optic  nerve,  and  then 
excused  himself  by  affirming,  that  he  had,  however,  not  touched 
the  eye. 

The  third  condition  of  a  right  though  inadequate  notion  is,  that 
the  error  occasioned  be  greatly  outweighed  by  the  importance  of 
the  truth  communicated.  The  rustic  would  have  little  reason  to 
thank  the  philosopher,  who  should  give  him  true  conceptions  of 
the  folly  of  believing  in  ghosts,  omens,  dreams,  &c.  at  the  price 
of  abandoning  his  faith  in  divine  providence,  and  in  the  continued 
existence  of  his  fellow-creatures  after  their  death.  The  teeth  of 
the  old  serpent  planted  by  the  Cadmuses  of  French  literature, 
under  Lewis  XV.,  produced  a  plenteous  crop  of  philosophers  and 
truth-trumpeters  of  this  kind,  in  the  reign  of  his  successor.  They 
taught  many  truths,  historical,  political,  physiological,  and  ecclesi 
astical,  and  diflused  their  notions  so  widely,  that  the  very  ladies 
and  hair-dressers  of  Paris  became  fluent  encyclopedists  :  and  the 
sole  price  which  their  scholars  paid  for  these  treasures  of  new  in 
formation,  was  to  believe  Christianity  an  imposture,  the  Scrip 
tures  a  forgery,  the  worship,  if  not  the  belief,  of  G  od  superstition, 
hell  a  fable,  heaven  a  dream,  our  life  without  providence,  and 
our  death  without  hope.  They  became  as  gods  as  soon  as  the 
fruit  of  this  Upas  tree  of  knowledge  and  liberty  had  opened  their 
•eyes  to  perceive  that  they  were  no  more  than  beasts — somewhat 
more  cunning,  perhaps,  and  abundantly  more  mischievous.  What 
can  be  conceived  more  natural  than  the  result, — that  self-ac 
knowledged  beasts  should  first  act,  and  next  suffer  themselves  to 
be  treated,  as  beasts.  We  judge  by  comparison.  To  exclude  the 
great  is  to  magnify  the  little.  The  disbelief  of  essential  wisdom 
and  goodness,  necessarily  prepares  the  imagination  for  the  su 
premacy  of  cunning  with  malignity.  Folly  and  vice  have  their 
appropriate  religions,  as  well  as  virtue  and  true  knowledge  :  and 
in  some  way  or  other  fools  will  dance  round  the  golden  calf,  and 
wicked  rnen  beat  their  timbrels  and  kettle-drums  to, — 

— Moloch,  horrid  king,  besmeared  with  blood 
Of  human  sacrifice  and  parents'  tears. 


ESSAY    VI.  53 

My  feelings  have  led  me  on,  .and  in  my  illustration  I  had 
almost  lost  from  my  view  the  subject  to  be  illustrated.  One 
condition  yet  remains  :  that  the  error  foreseen  shall  not  be  of  a 
kind  to  prevent  or  impede  the  after  acquirement  of  that  knowl 
edge  which  will  remove  it.  Observe,  how  graciously  nature  in 
structs  her  human  children.  She  can  not  give  us  the  knowledge 
derived  from  sight  without  occasioning  us  at  first  to  mistake 
images  of  reflection  for  ^substances.  But  the  very  consequences 
of  the  delusion  lead  inevitably  to  its  detection  ;  and  out  of  the 
ashes  of  the  error  rises  a  new  flower  of  knowledge.  We  not  only 
see,  but  are  enabled  to  discover  by  what  means  we  see.  So,  too, 
we  are  under  the  necessity,  in  given  circumstances,  of  mistaking 
a  square  for  a  round  object  :  but  ere  the  mistake  can  have  any 
practical  consequences,  it  is  not  only  removed,  but  in  its  removal 
gives  us  the  symbol  of  a  new  fact,  that  of  distance.  In  a  similar 
train  of  thought,  though  more  fancifully,  I  might  have  elucidated 
the  preceding  condition,  and  have  referred  our  hurrying  en- 
lighteners  and  revolutionary  amputators  to  the  gentleness  of  na 
ture,  in  the  oak  and  the  beech,  the  dry  foliage  of  which  she 
pushes  off  only  by  the  propulsion  of  the  new  buds,  that  supply  its 
place.  My  friends  !  a  clothing  even  of  withered  leaves  is  better 
than  bareness. 

Having  thus  determined  the  nature  and  conditions  of  a  right 
notion,  it  remains  to  consider  the  circumstances  which  tend  to 
render  the  communication  of  it  impracticable,  and  oblige  us  of 
course,  to  abstain  from  the  attempt — oblige  us  not  to  convey  false 
hood  under  the  pretext  of  saying  truth.  These  circumstances,  it 
is  plain,  must  consist  either  in  natural  or  moral  impediments. 
The  former,  including  the  obvious  gradatic  is  of  constitutional  in 
sensibility  and  derangement,  preclude  all  temptation  to  miscon 
duct,  as  well  as  all  probability  of  ill-consequences  from  accidental 
oversight,  on  the  part  of  the  communicator.  Far  otherwise  is  it 
with  the  impediments  from  moral  causes.  These  demand  all  the 
attention  and  forecast  of  the  genuine  lovers  of  truth  in  the  matter, 
the  manner, , and  the  time  of  their  communications  public  and 
private  ;  and  these  are  the  ordinary  materials  of  the  vain  and  the 
factious,  determine  them  in  the  choice  of  their  audiences  and  of 
their  arguments,  and  to  each  argument  give  powers  not  its  own. 
They  are  distinguishable  into  two  sources,  the  streams  from 
which,  however,  most  often  become  confluent,  namely,  hindrances 


54  THE    FRIEND. 

from  ignorance, — (I  here  use  .the  word  in  relation  to  the  habits 
of  reasoning  as  well  as  to  the  previous  knowledge  requisite  for  the 
due  comprehension  of  the  subject,) — and  hindrances  from  pre 
dominant  passions.^ 

From  both  these  the  law  of  conscience  commands  us  to  ab 
stain,  because  such  being  the  ignorance  and  such  the  passions  of 
the  supposed  auditors,  we  ought  to  deduce  the  impracticability  of 
conveying  not  only  adequate  but  even  right  notions  of  our  own 
convictions  :  much  less  does  it  permit  us  to  avail  ourselves  of  the 
causes  of  this  impracticability  in  order  to  procure  nominal  prose 
lytes,  each  of  whom  will  have  a  different,  and  all  a  false,  con 
ception  of  those  notions  that  were  to  be  conveyed  for  their  truth's 
sake  alone.  Whatever  is,  or  but  for  some  defect  in  our  moral 
character  would  have  been,  ibreseen  as  preventing  the  convey 
ance  of  our  thoughts,  makes  the  attempt  an  act  of  self-contradic 
tion  :  and  whether  the  faulty  cause  exist  in  our  choice  of  unfit 
words  or  our  choice  of  unfit  auditors,  the  result  is  the  same  and 
so  is  the  guilt.  We  have  voluntarily  communicated  falsehood. 

Thus,  without  reference  to  consequences, — if  only  one  short 
digression  be  excepted — from  the  sole  principle  of  self-consistence 
or  moral  integrity,  we  have  evolved  the  clue  of  right  reason, 
which  we  are  bound  to  follow  in  the  communication  of  truth. 
Now  then  let  me  appeal  to  the  judgment  and  experience  of  the 
reader,  whether  he  who  most  faithfully  adheres  to  the  letter  of 
the  law  of  conscience  will  not  likewise  act  in  strictest  correspon 
dence  to  the  maxims  of  prudence  and  .sound  policy.  I  am  at 
least  unable  to  recollect  a  single  instance,  either  in  history  or  in 
my  personal  experience,  of  a  preponderance  of  injurious  conse 
quences  from  the  publication  of  any  truth,  under  the  observance 
of  the  moral  conditions  above  stated  :  much  less  can  I  even 
imagine  any  case,  in  which  truth,  as  truth,  can  be  pernicious. 
But  if  the  assertor  of  the  indifTerency  of  truth  and  falsehood  in 
their  own  natures,  attempt  to  justify  his  position  by  confining  the 
word  truth,  in  the  first  instance,  to  the  correspondence  of  given 
words  to  given  facts,  without  reference  to  the  total  impression 
left  by  such  words, — what  is  this  more  than  to  assert,  that  ar 
ticulated  sounds  are  things  of  moral  indifferency  ; — and  that  we 
may  relate  a  fact  accurately,  and  nevertheless  deceive  grossly  arid 
wickedly  ?  Blifil  related  accurately  Tom  Jones's  riotous  joy 
*  See  Lay  Sermon  addressed  to  the  higher  and  middle  classes.  VI. 


ESSAY    VI.  55 

during  his  benefactor's  illness,  only  omitting  that  this  joy  was  oc 
casioned  by  the  physician's  having  pronounced  him  out  of  danger. 
Blifil  was  not  the  less  a  liar  for  being  an  accurate  matter-of-fact 
liar.  Toll-truths  in  the  service  of  falsehood  we  find  everywhere, 
of  various  names  and  various  occupations,  from  the  elderly  young 
women  that  discuss  the  love  affairs  of  their  friends  and  acquain 
tances  at  the  village  tea-tables,  to  the  anonymous  calumniators 
of  literary  merit  in  reviews,  and  the  more  daring  malignants,  who 
dole  out  discontent,  innovation  and  panic,  in  political  journals  : 
and  a  most  pernicious  race  of  liars  they  are  !  But  who  ever 
doubted  it  ? — Why  should  our  moral  feelings  be  shocked,  and  the 
holiest  words  with  all  their  venerable  associations  be  profaned,  in 
order  to  bring  forth  a  truism  !  But  thus  it  is  for  the  most  part 
with  the  venders  of  startling  paradoxes.  In  the  sense  in  which 
they  are  to  gain  for  their  author  the  character  of  a  bold  and 
original  thinker,  they  arc  false  even  to  absurdity  ;  and  the  sense 
in  which  they  are  true  and  harmless,  conveys  so  mere  a  truism, 
that  it  even  borders  on  nonsense.  How  often  have  we  heard — 
"  The  rights  of  man — hurra  ! — The  sovereignty  of  the  people — 
hurra!" — roared  out  by  men  who,  if  called  upon  in  another 
place  and  beibre  another  audience,  to  explain  themselves,  would 
give  to  the  words  a  meaning,  in  which  the  most  monarchical  of 
their  political  opponents  would  admit  them  to  be  true,  but  which 
would  contain  nothing  new,  or  strange,  or  stimulant,  nothing  to 
flatter  the  pride,  or  kindle  the  passions,  of  the  populace  ! 


ITT"}?  i 


OP  IT* 

7ET 


t  ~ 


ESSAY  VII. 


At  profanwn  vulgus  lectorum  quomodo  arcendum  est?  Librisne  nostris 
jubeamus,  ut  cor  am  indignis  obmutcscant  ?  Si  linguis,  ut  dicitur,  emortuis 
utajnur,  ehcu  !  ingenium  quoque  nobis  cmortuumjacet  :  sin  aliter,  —  Minervce 
Kccreta  crassis  hidibrium  divulgamus,  et  Dianam  nostram  impuris  hujus  sce- 
culi  Actceonibus  nudam  proferimus.  Eespondeo  :  ad  incommodi.  tales  hujus- 
modi  evitandas,  ncc  Greece  nee  JLatine  scriberc  opus  cst.  Snfficict,  nos  sicca 
luce  usos  fuisse  et  strictiore  argumcntandi  mettiodo.  Sujficiet,  innocent  er, 
utiliter  scripscisse  :  eventus  est  opud  lectorem.  Nuper  emptmn  est  a  nobis 
Ciceronianum  istud  De  Officiis,  opus  quod  semper  'pcctte  Christiana  d/ynum 
putabamus.  Minim!  libcllus  factus  fuerat  famosisximus.  Credisne  ?  Vix: 
at  quomodo  ?  Maligno  quodcun,  ncscio  quern,  plena  marglne  et  super  tergo, 
annotation  cst,  et  exemplis,  calumniis  poti.us,  superfcetatain  !  Sic  et  qui  in- 
trorsum  uritur  injlammationes  animi  vel  Catonianix(ne  dicam,  sacroxanctis) 
pagin'ts  ftccipit.  Omni  aura  mons,  omnibus  scriptis  mens  ignita,  vescitur. 

]luDOLr>n  LANGII,  Epist.  ad  amicum  qucmdam  Italicum,  iu  qua 

lingujo  patrise  et  hodici-na>  usuin  defendit   et  eruditis  coiu- 

mendat. 

Nee  me  faUit,  ut  in  corporibus  hominum  sic  in  atiimis  multiplici  passione 
affectis,  inedicamentct  verborum  wullitt  inefficaeia  visum  iri,.  Sed  nee  illud 
quoque  me  prwtcrit,  ut  invisibiles  animorum  morbos}  sic  invisibilia  esse  reme- 
dia.  Falsis  opinionibus  circumventi  veris  scntentlis  liberandi  simt,  ut  qui 
audiendo  ceciderant  audicndo  consurgant. 

Prefat.  in  lib.  de  rcmed.  utriusque  fortunce,  sub  fin. 


But  how  are  we  to  guard  against  the  herd  of  promiscuous  readers  ?  Can 
we  bid  our  books  be  silent  in  the  presence  of  the  unworthy  ?  If  we  employ 
what  are  called  the  dead  languages,  our  own  genius,  alas  !  becomes  flat  and 
dead  :  and  if  we  embody  our  thoughts  in  the  words  native  to  them  or  in 
which  they  were  conceived,  we  divulge  the  secrets  of  Minerva  to  the  ridicule 
of  blockheads,  and  expose  our  Diana  to  the  Actaxnis  of  a  sensual  age.  I  re 
ply  :  that  in  order  to  avoid  inconveniences  of  this  kind,  we  need  write  nei 
ther  in  Greek  nor  in  Latin.  It  will  be  enough,  if  we  abstain  from  appeal 
ing  to  the  bad  passions  and  low  appetites,  and  confine  ourselves  to  a  strictly 
consequent  method  of  reasoning. 

To  have  written  innocently,  and  for  wise"  purposes,  is  all  that  can  be  re 
quired  of  us  :  the  event  lies  with  the  reader.  I  purchased  latelv  Cicero's 
work,  De  Officiis,  which  I  had  always  considered  as  almost  worthy  of  a 
Christian.  To  my  surprise  it  had  become  a  most  flagrant  libel.  Nay  1  but 


ESSAY    VII.  57 

how  f — Some  one,  I  know  not  who,  out  of  the  fruitfulness  of  his  own  malig 
nity,  had  tilled  all  the  margins  and  other  blank  spaces  with  annotations — a 
true  superfsetation  of  examples,  that  is,  of  false  and  slanderous  tales  !  In 
like  manner,  the  slave  of  impure  desires  will  turn  the  pages  of  Cato,  not  to 
say,  Scripture  itself,  into  occasions  and  excitements  of  wanton  imaginations. 
There  is  no  wind  but  fans  a  volcano,  no  work  but  feeds  a  combustible  mind. 
I  am  well  aware,  that  words  will  appear  to  many  as  inefficacious  medi 
cines  when  administered  to  minds  agitated  with  manifold  passions,  as  when 
they  are  muttered  by  way  of  charm  over  bodily  ailments.  But  neither  does 
it  escape  me,  on  the  other  hand,  that  as  the  diseases  of  the  mind  are  invisi 
ble,  invisible  must  the  remedies  likewise  be.  Those  who  have  been  en 
trapped  by  false  opinions  are  to  be  liberated  by  convincing  truths  :  that 
thus  having  imbibed  the  poison  through  the  ear  they  may  receive  the  anti 
dote  by  the  same  channel. 

THAT  our  elder  writers  to  Jeremy  Taylor  inclusively  quoted  to 
excess,  it  would  be  the  very  blindness  of  partiality  to  deny.  More 
than  one  might  be  mentioned,  whose  works  are  well  character 
ized  in  the  words  of  Milton,  as  a  paroxysm  of  citations,  pampered 
metaphors,  and  aphorisming  pedantry.  On  the  other  hand,  it 
seems  to  me  that  we  now  avoid  quotations  with  an  anxiety  that 
offends  in  the  contrary  extreme.  Yet  it  is  the  beauty  and  inde 
pendent  worth  of  the  citations  far  more  than  their  appropriateness 
which  have  made  Johnson's  Dictionary  popular  even  as  a  reading 
book — and  the  mottos  with  the  translations  of  them  are  known 
to  add  considerably  to  the  value  of  the  Spectator.  With  this 
conviction  I  have  taken  more  than  common  pains  in  the  selection 
of  the  mottos  for  The  Friend  :  arid  of  two  mottos  equally  appro 
priate  prefer  always  that  from  the  book  which  is  least  likely  to 
have  come  into  my  readers'  hands.  For  I  often  please  myself 
with  the  fancy,  now  that  I  may  have  saved  from  oblivion  the 
only  striking  passage  in  a  whole  volume,  and  now  that  I  may 
have  attracted  notice  to  a  writer  undeservedly  forgotten.  If  this 
should  he  attributed  to  a  silly  ambition  in  the  display  of  various 
reading,  I  can  do  no  more  than  deny  any  consciousness  of  having 
been  so  actuated  :  and  for  the  rest,  I  must  console  myself  by  the 
reflection,  that  if  it  be  one  of  the  most  foolish,  it  is  at  the  same 
time  one  of  the  most  harmless,  of  human  vanities. 

The  passages  prefixed  lead  at  once  to  the  question,  which  will 
probably  have  more  than  once  occurred  to  the  reflecting  reader 
of  the  preceding  essay.  How  will  these  rules  apply  to  the  most 
important  mode  of  communication  ?  to  that,  in  which  one  man 

c* 


68  THE    FRIEND. 

may  utter  his  thoughts  to  myriads  of  men  at  the  same  time,  and 
to  myriads  of  myriads  at  various  times  and  through  successions 
of  generations  ?  How  do  they  apply  to  authors,  whose  foreknowl 
edge  assuredly  does  not  inform  them  who,  or  how  many,  or  of 
what  description,  their  readers  will  be  ?  How  do  ther  3  rules 
apply  to  books,  which  once  published,  are  as  likely  to  fall  in  the 
way  of  the  incompetent  as  of  the  judicious,  and  will  be  fortunate 
indeed  if  they  are  not  many  limes  looked  at  through  the  thick 
mists  of  ignorance,  or  amid  the  glare  of  prejudice  and  passion  \ — 
I  answer  in  the  first  place,  that  this  is  not  universally  true.  The 
(readers  are  not  seldom  picked  and  chosen.  Relations  of  certain 
/pretended  miracles  performed  a  few  years  ago,  at  Holywell,  in 
/consequence  of  prayers  to  the  Virgin  Mary,  on  female  servants, 
and  these  relations  moralized  by  the  old  Roman  Catholic  argu 
ments  without  the  old  Protestant  answers,  have  to  my  knowledge 
been  sold  by  travelling  pedlers  in  villages* and  farm-houses,  not 
only  in  a  form  which  placed  them  within  the  reach  of  the  narrow 
est  means,  but  sold  at  a  price  less  than  their  prime  cost,  and  doubt 
less,  thrown  in  occasionally  as  the  make-weight  in  a  bargain  of 
pins  and  stay-tape.  Shall  I  be  told,  that  the  publishers  and  rev 
erend  authorizers  of  these  base  and  vulgar  delusions  had  exerted 
no  choice  as  to  the  purchasers  and  readers  ?  But  waiving  this, 
or  rather  having  first  pointed  it  out,  as  an  important  exception,  I 
further  reply, — that  if  the  author  have  clearly  and  rightly  estab 
lished  in  his  own  mind  the  class  of  readers,  to  which  .he  means  to 
address  his  communications  ;  and  if  both  in  this  choice,  and  in 
the  particulars  of  the  manner  and  matter  of  his  work,  he  con 
scientiously  observe  all  the  conditions  which  reason  and  con 
science  have  been  shown  to  dictate,  in  relation  to  those  for  whom 
the  work  was  designed  ;  he  will,  in  most  instances,  have  effected 
his  design  arid  realized  the  desired  circumscription.  The  posthu 
mous  work  of  Spinoza — (Ethica  ordine  geometrico  demonstrata) 
— may,  indeed,  accidentally  fall  into  the  hands  of  an  incompetent 
reader.  But  (not  to  mention,  that  it  is  written  in  a  dead  lan 
guage),  it  will  be  entirely  harmless,  because  it  must  needs  be  ut 
terly  unintelligible.  I  venture  to  assert,  that  the  whole  first  book, 
De  Deo,  might  be  read  in  a  literal  English  translation  to  any 
congregation  in  the  kingdom,  and  that  no  individual  who  had  not 
been  habituated  to  the  strictest  and  most  laborious  processes  of 
reasoning,  would  even  suspect  its  orthodoxy  or  piety,  however 


ESSAY    VII.  59 

heavily  the  fe\v  who  listened  might  complain  of  its  ohscurity  and 
want  of  interest. 

This,  it  may  be  objected,  is  an  extreme  case.  But  it  is  not  so 
for  the  present  purpose.  1  am  speaking  of  the  probability  of  in 
jurious  consequences  from  the  communication  of  truth.  This  I 
have  denied,  if  the  right  means  have  been  adopted,  and  the  neces 
sary  conditions  adhered  to,  for  its  actual  communication.  Now 
the  truths — that  is,  the  positions  believed  by  the  author  to  be 
truths — conveyed  in  a  book  are  either  evident  of  themselves,  or 
such  as  require  a  train  of  deductions  in  proo£:  and  the  latter  will 
be  either  such  truths  as  are  authorized  and  generally  received ; 
or  such  as  are  in  opposition  to  received  and  authorized  opinions  ; 
or  lastly,  positions  presented  as  truths  for  the  appropriate  test  of 
examination,  and  still  under  trial,  adhuc  in  lite.  Of  this  latter 
class  I  affirm,  that  in  no  one  of  the  three  sorts  can  an  instance 
be  brought  of  a  preponderance  of  ill-consequences,  or  even  of  an 
equilibrium  of  advantage  and  injury  from  a  work,  in  which  the 
understanding  alone  has  been  appealed  to,  by  results  fairly  de 
duced  from  just  premises,  in  terms  strictly  appropriate.  Alas  ! 
legitimate  reasoning  is  impossible  without  severe  thinking,  and 
thinking  is  neither  an  easy  nor  an  amusing  employment.  The 
reader,  who  would  follow  a  close  reasoner  to  the  summit  and  ab 
solute  principle  of  any  one  important  sulfject,  has  chosen  a  cha 
mois-hunter  for  his  guide.  Our  guide  will,  indeed,  take  us  the 
shortest  way,  will  save  us  many  a  wearisome  and  perilous  wan 
dering,  and  warn  us  of  many  a  mock  road  that  had  formerly  led 
himself  to  the  brink  of  chasms  and  precipices,  or  at  best  in  an 
idle  circle  to  the  spot  from  which  he  started.  But  he  can  not 
carry  us  on  his  shoulders  :  we  must  strain  our  own  sinews,  as  he 
has  strained  his  ;  and  make  firm  footing  on  the  smooth  rock  for 
ourselves,  by  the  blood  of  toil  from  our  own  feet.  Examine  the 
journals  of  our  humane  and  zealous  missionaries  in  Hindostan. 
How  often  and  how  feelingly  do  they  describe  the  difficulty  of 
making  the  simplest  chain  of  reasoning  intelligible  to  the  ordi 
nary  natives  :  the  rapid  exhaustion  of  their  whole  power  of  atten 
tion,  and  with  what  pain  and  distressful  eflort  it  is  exerted,  while 
it  lasts.  Yet  it  is  amongst  individuals  of  this  class,  that  the  hid 
eous  practices  of  self-torture  chiefly,  indeed  almost  exclusively, 
prevail.  0  !  if  folly  were  no  easier  than  wisdom,  it  being  often 
so  very  much  more  grievous,  how  certainly  might  not  these  mis- 


60  THE    FKIEND. 

arable  men  be  converted  to  Christianity  ?  But  alas  !  to  swing 
by  hooks  passed  through  the  back,  or  to  walk  on  shoes  with  nails 
of  iron  pointed  upward  on  the  soles,  all  this  is  so  much  less  diffi 
cult,  demands  so  veiy  inferior  an  exertion  of  the  will  than  to 
think,  and  by  thought  to  gain  knowledge  and  tranquillity  ! 

It  is  not  true,  that  ignorant  persons  have  no  notion  of  the  ad 
vantages  of  truth  and  knowledge.  They  see  and  confess  those 
advantages  in  the  conduct,  the  immunities,  and  the  superior  pow 
ers  of  the  possessors.  Were  these  attainable  by  pilgrimages  the 
most  toilsome,  or  penances  the  most  painful,  we  should  assuredly 
have  as  many  pilgrims  and  as  many  self-tormentors  in  the  ser 
vice  of  true  religion  and  virtue,  as  now  exist  under  the  tyranny 
of  Papal  or  Brahman  superstition.  This  inefficacy  of  legitimate 
reason,  from  the  want  of  fit  objects, — this  its  relative  weakness, 
and  how  narrow  at  all  times  its  immediate  sphere  of  action  must 
be, — is  proved  to  us  by  the  impostors  of  all  professions.  What,  I 
pray,  is  their  fortress,  the  rock  which  is  both  their  quarry  and 
their  foundation,  from  which  and  on  which  they  are  built  ? — 
The  desire  of  arriving  at  the  end  without  the  effort  of  thought 
and  will,  which  are  the  appointed  means.  Let  us  look  back 
ward  three  or  four  centuries.  Then,  as  now,  the  great  mass  of 
mankind  were  governed  by  the  three  main  wishes,  the  wish  for 
vigor  of  body,  including  the  absence  of  painful  feelings  ; — for 
wealth,  or  the  power  of  procuring  the  external  conditions  of  bod 
ily  enjoyment, — these  during  life  ;  and  security  from  pain  and 
continuance  of  happiness  after  death.  Then,  as  now,  men  were 
desirous  to  attain  them  by  some  easier  means  than  those  of  tem 
perance,  industry,  and  strict  justice.  They  gladly  therefore  ap 
plied  to  the  priest,  who  could  insure  them  happiness  hereafter 
without  the  performance  of  their  duties  here  ;  to  the  lawyer  who 
could  make  money  a  substitute  for  a  right  cause ;  to  the  physi 
cian,  whose  medicines  promised  to  take  the  sting  out  of  the  tail 
of  their  sensual  indulgences,  and  let  them  fondle  and  play  with 
vice,  as  with  a  charmed  serpent  ;  to  the  alchemist,  whose  gold- 
tincture  would  enrich  them  without  toil  or  economy ;  and  to  the 
astrologer,  from  whom  they  could  purchase  foresight  without 
knowledge  or  reflection.  The  established  professions  w^ere,  with 
out  exception,  no  other  than  licensed  modes  of  witchcraft.  The 
wizards,  who  would  now  find  their  due  reward  in  Bridewell,  and 
their  appropriate  honors  in  the  pillory,  sat  then  on  episcopal 


ESSAY    VIII.  61 

thrones,  candidates  for  saintship,  and  already  canonized  in  the 
belief  of  their  deluded  contemporaries  ;  while  the  one  or  two  real 
teachers  and  discoverers  of  truth  were  exposed  to  the  hazard  of 
lire  and  fagot, — a  dungeon  the  best  shrine  that  was  vouchsafed 
to  a  Roger  Bacon*  and  a  Galileo  ! 


ESSAY    VIII. 

Pray,  why  is  it,'  that  people  say  that  men  are  not  such  fools  now-a-days 
as  they  were  in  the  days  of  yore  ?  I  would  fain  know,  whether  you  would 
have  us  understand  by  this  same  saying,  as  indeed  you  logically  may,  that 
formerly,  men  were  fools,  and  in  this  generation  are  grown  wise?  How 
many  and  what  dispositions  made  them  fools  ?  How  many  and  what 
dispositions  were  wanting  to  make  'em  wise  ?  Why  were  those  fools  ? 
How  should  these  be  wise  ?  Pray,  how  came  yo\i  to  know  that  men 
were  formerly  fools  ?  How  did  you  find  that  they  are  now  wise  ?  Who 
made  them  fools  ?  Who  in  Heaven's  name  made  us  wise  ?  Who  d'ye 
think  are  most,  those  that  loved  mankind  foolish,  or  those  that  love  it 
wise  ?  How  long  has  it  been  wise  ?  How  long  otherwise  ?  Whence 
proceeded  the  foregoing  folly  ?  Whence  the  following  wisdom  ?  Why  did 
the  old  folly  end  now  and  no  later  ?  Why  did  the  modern  wisdom  begin 
now  and  no  sooner  ?  What  were  we  the  worse  for  the  former  follv  ? 
What  the  better  for  the  succeeding  wisdom?  How  should  the  ancient 
folly  have  come  to  nothing?  How  should  this  same  new  wisdom  be 
started  up  and  established  ?  Now  answer  me,  an't  please  you ! 

RABELAIS'  Preface  to  his  5th  Hook. 

MONSTERS  and  madmen  canonized  and  Galileo  blind  in  a  dun 
geon  If  It  is  not  so  in  our  times.  Heaven  be  praised,  that  in 
this  respect,  at  least,  we  are,  if  not  better,  yet  better  off,  than  our 

*  "  It  is  for  his  country,  not  his  order,  to  glory  in  the  man  whom  that 
order  condemned  to  imprisonment,  not  for  his  supposed  skill  in  magic, 
but  for  those  opinions  which  he  derived  from  studying  the  Scriptures, 
wherein  he  was  versed  beyond  any  other  person  of  his  age." 

SOUTHEY'S  Colloquies,  viii. 

And  see  the  note  there. — Ed* 

\  This  is  not  strictly  accurate.  Galileo  was  sentenced  by  the  Inquisi 
tion  at  Rome,  on  the  22d  of  June,  1633;  and,  although  his  right  eye  had 
been  formerly  affected,  he  did  not  become  blind  till  the  end  of  1637.  His 
confinement,  likewise,  in  the  proper  prison  of  the  Inquisition,  was  merely 
nominal,  although  the  restrictions  under  which  he  was  kept  to  the  end 
cf  his  life,  were  of  tho  most  distressing  and  injurious  description. — Ed. 


62  THE    FRIEND. 

forefathers.  But  to  what,  and  to  whom  (under  Providence)  do 
we  owe  the  improvement  ?  To  any  radical  change  in  the  moral 
affections  of  mankind  in  general  ?  Perhaps  the  great  majority 
of  men  are  now  fully  conscious  that  they  are  bom  with  the  god 
like  faculty  of  reason,  and  that  it  is  the  business  of  life  to  devel 
op  and  apply  it  ? — The  Jacob's  ladder  of  truth,  let  down  from 
heaven,  with  all  its  numerous  rounds,  is  now  the  common  high 
way,  on  which  we  are  content  to  toil  upward  to  the  objects  of 
our  desires  ? — We  are  ashamed  of  expecting  the  end  without  the 
means  ? — In  order  to  answer  these  questions  in  the  affirmative, 
I  must  have  forgotten  the  animal  magnetists  ;*  the  proselytes 
of  Brothers,  and  of  Joanna  Southcote  ;  and  some  thousand  fanat 
ics  less  original  in  their  creeds,  but  not  a  whit  more  rational  in 
their  expectations  ;  I  must  forget  the  infamous  empirics,  whose 
advertisements  pollute  arid  disgrace  all  our  newspapers,  arid  al 
most  paper  the  walls  of  our  cities  ;  and  the  vending  of  whose 
poisons  and  poisonous  drams — with  shame  and  anguish  be  it 
spoken — supports  a  shop  in  every  market-town  !  I  must  forget 
that  other  reproach  of  the  nation,  that  mother- vice,  the  lottery  ! 
I  must  forget,  that  a  numerous  class  plead  prudence  for  keeping 
their  fellow-men  ignorant  and  incapable  of  intellectual  enjoy 
ments,  and  the  revenue  for  upholding  such  temptations  as  men  so 
ignorant  will  not  withstand, — yes  !  that  even  senators  and  offi 
cers  of  state  put  forth  the  revenue  as  a  sufficient  reason  for  up 
holding,  at  every  fiftieth  door  throughout  the  kingdom,  tempta 
tions  to  the  most  pernicious  vices,  which  fill  the  land  with 
mourning,  and  fit  the  laboring  classes  for  sedition  and  religious 
fanaticism  !  Above  all  I  must  forget  the  first  years  of  the  French 
revolution,  and  the  millions  throughout  Europe  who  confidently 
expected  the  best  and  choicest  results  of  knowledge  and  virtue, 
namely,  liberty  and  universal  peace,  from  the  votes  of  a  tumult 
uous  assembly — that  is,  from  the  mechanical  agitation  of  the.  air 
in  a  large  room  at  Paris — and  this  too  in  the  most  light,  unthink 
ing,  sensual,  and  profligate,  of  the  European  nations, — a  nation, 
the  very  phrases  of  whose  language  are  so  composed,  that  they 
can  scarcely  speak  without  lying  ! — No  !  Let  us  not  deceive 
ourselves.  Like  the  man  who  used  to  pull  off  his  hat  with  great 
demonstration  of  respect  whenever  he  spoke  of  himself,  we  are 

*  Recanted  since  1817.     After  subtracting  all  exaggerated  or  doubtful 
testimonies,  the  undeniable  facts  are  as  important  as  they  are  surprising. 


ESSAY    VIII.  63 

fond  of  styling  our  own  the  enlightened  age  :  though  as  Jortin,  I 
think,  has  wittily  remarked,  the  golden  age  would  be  more  ap 
propriate.  But  in  spite  of  our  great  scientific  discoveries,  for 
which  praise  be  given  to  whom  the  praise  is  due,  and  in  spite  of 
that  general  indifference  to  all  the  truths  and  all  the  principles 
of  truth,  that  belong  to  our  permanent  being,  and  therefore  do 
not  lie  within  the  sphere  of  our  senses, — that  same  indifference 
which  makes  toleration  so  easy  a  virtue  with  us,  and  constitutes 
nine  tenths  of  our  pretended  illumination, — it  still  remains  the 
character  of  the  mass  of  mankind  to  seek  for  the  attainment  of 
their  necessary  ends  by  any  means  rather  than  the  appointed 
ones  ;  and  for  this  cause  only,  that  the  latter  imply  the  exertion 
of  the  reason  and  the  will.  But  of  all  things  this  demands  the 
longest  apprenticeship,  even  an  apprenticeship  from  infancy ; 
which  is  generally  neglected,  because  an  excellence,  that  may 
and  should  belong  to  all  men,  is  expected  to  come  to  every  man 
of  its  own  accord. 

To  whom  then  do  we  owe  our  meliorated  condition  ? — To  the 
successive  few  in  every  age, — more  indeed  in  one  generation  than 
in  another,  but  relatively  to  the  mass  of  mankind  always  few, — 
who  by  the  intensity  and  permanence  of  their  action  have  com 
pensated  for  the  limited  sphere,  within  which  it  is  at  any  one 
time  intelligible  ;  and  whose  good  deeds  posterity  reverences  in 
their  results  ;  though  the  mode,  in  which  we  repair  the  inevitable 
waste  of  time,  and  the  style  of  our  additions,  too  generally  furnish 
a  sad  proof,  how  little  we  understand  the  principles.  I  appeal 
to  the  histories  of  the  Jewish,  the  Grecian,  and  the  Roman  re" 
publics,  to  the  records  of  the  Christian  Church,  to  the  history  of 
Europe  from  the  treaty  of  Westphalia,  1648.  What  do  they 
contain  but  accounts  of  noble  structures  raided  by  the  wisdom  of 
the  few,  and  gradually  undermined  by  the  ignorance  and  profli 
gacy  of  the  many  ?  If  therefore  the  deficiency  of  good,  which 
everywhere  surrounds  us,  originate  in  the  general  unfitness  and 
aversion  of  men  to  the  process  of  thought,  that  is,  to  continuous 
reasoning,  it  must  surely  be  absurd  to  apprehend  a  preponderance 
of  evil  from  works  which  can  not  act  at  all  except  as  far  as  they 
call  the  reasoning  faculties  into  full  co-exertion  with  them. 

Still,  however,  there  are  truths  so  self-evident,  or  so  imme 
diately  and  palpably  deduced  from  those  that  are,  or  are  ac 
knowledged  ibr  such,  that  they  are  at  once  intelligible  to  all  men, 


64  THE    FRIEND. 

who  possess  the  common  advantages  of  the  social  state  ;  although 
by  sophistry,  by  evil  habits,  by  the  neglect,  false  persuasions,  and 
impostures  of  an  anti-Christian  priesthood  joined  in  one  conspiracy 
with  the  violence  of  tyrannical  governors,  the  understandings  of 
men  may  become  so  darkened  and  their  consciences  so  lethargic, 
that  a  necessity  will  arise  for  the  republication  of  these  truths, 
and  this  too  with  a  voice  of  loud  alarm,  and  impassioned  warn 
ing.  Such  were  the  doctrines  proclaimed  by  the  first  Christians 
to  the  Pagan  world  ;  such  were  the  lightnings  flashed  by  Wick- 
liff,  Huss,  Luther,  Calvin,  Zuinglius,  Latirner,  and  others,  across 
the  Papal  darkness  ;  and  such  in  our  own  times  the  agitating 
truths,  with  which  Thomas  Clarkson,  and  his  excellent  con 
federates,  the  Quakers,  fought  and  conquered  the  legalized  ban 
ditti  of  men-stealers,  the  numerous  and  powerful  perpetrators  and 
advocates  of  rapine,  murder,  and  (of  blacker  guilt  than  either) 
slavery.  Truths  of  this  kind  being  indispensable  to  man,  con 
sidered  as  a  moral  being,  are  above  all  expedience,  all  accidental 
consequences  :  for  as  sure  as  God  is  holy,  and  man  immortal, 
there  can  be  no  evil  so  great  as  the  ignorance  or  disregard  of 
them.  It  is  the  very  madness  of  mock  prudence  to  oppose  the 
removal  of  a  poisoned  dish  on  account  of  the  pleasant  sauces  or 
nutritious  viands  which  would  be  lost  with  it  !  The  dish  con 
tains  destruction  to  that,  for  which  alone  we  ought  to  wish  the 
palate  to  be  gratified,  or  the  body  to  be  nourished. 

The  sole  condition,  therefore,  imposed  on  us  by  the  law  of  con 
science  in  these  cases  is,  that  we  employ  no  unworthy  and 
heterogeneous  means  to  realize  the  necessary  end, — that  we  in 
trust  the  event  wholly  to  the  full  and  adequate  promulgation  of 
the  truth,  and  to  those  generous  affections  which  the  constitution 
of  our  moral  nature  has  linked  to  the  fall  perception  of  it.  Yet 
evil  may,  nay  it  will,  be  occasioned.  Weak  men  may  take 
offence,  and  wicked  men  avail  themselves  of  it ;  though  we  must 
not  attribute  to  the  promulgation,  or  to  the  truth  promulgated, 
all  the  evil,  of  which  wicked  men — predetermined,  like  the  wolf 
in  the  fable,  to  create  some  occasion — may  choose  to  make  it  the 
pretext.  But  that  there  ever  was,  or  ever  can  be,  a  preponder 
ance  of  evil,  I  defy  either  the  historian  to  instance,  or  the  philoso 
pher  to  prove.  "  Let  it  fly  away,  all  that  chaff  of  light  faith  that 
can  fly  off  at  any  breath  of  temptation  ;  the  cleaner  will  the  true 
grain  be  stored  up  in  the  granary  of  the  Lord," — we  are  entitled 


ESSAY    VIII.  65 

to  say  with  Tertullian  :*  and  to  exclaim  with  heroic  Luther, — 
"  Scandal  and  offence  ^  Talk  not  to  me  of  scandal  and  offence. 
Need  breaks  through  stone  walls,  and  recks  not  of  scandal.  It  is 
my  duty  to  spare  weak  consciences  as  far  as  it  may  be  done 
without  hazard  of  my  soul.  "Where  not,  I  must  take  counsel  for 
my  soul,  though  half  or  the  whole  world  should  be  scandalized 
thereby."! 

Luther  felt  and  preached  and  wrote  and  acted,  as  beseemed  a 
Luther  to  feel  and  utter  and  act.  The  truths,  which  had  been 
outraged,  he  re-proclaimed  in  the  spirit  of  outraged  truth,  at  the 
behest  of  his  conscience  and  in  the  service  of  the  God  of  truth. 
He  did  his  duty,  come  good,  come  evil !  and  made  no  question, 
on  which  side  the  preponderance  would  be.  In  the  one  scale 
there  was  gold,  and  impressed  thereon  the  image  arid  superscrip 
tion  of  the  universal  Sovereign.  In  all  the  wide  and  ever- widen 
ing  commerce  of  mind  with  mind  throughout  the  world,  it  is 
treason  to  refuse  it.  Can  this  have  a  counter-weight  ?  The 
other  scale  indeed  might  have  seemed  full  up  to  the  very  balance- 
yard  ;  but  of  what  worth  and  substance  were  its  contents  ? 
Were  they  capable  of  being  counted  or  weighed  against  the  for 
mer  ?  The  conscience,  indeed,  is  already  violated  when  to  moral 
good  or  evil  we  oppose  things  possessing  no  moral  interest.  Even 
if  the  conscience  dared  waive  this  her  preventive  veto,  yet  before 
we  could  consider  the  twofold  results  in  the  relation'  of  loss  and 
gain,  it  must  be  known  whether  their  kind  is  the  same  or  equiva 
lent.  They  must  first  be  valued,  and  then  they  maybe  weighed 
or  counted,  if  they  are  worth  it.  But  in  the  particular  case  at 
present  before  us,  the  loss  is  contingent  and  alien  ;  the  gain  es 
sential  and  the  tree's  own  natural  produce.  The  gain  is  perma 
nent,  and  spreads  through  all  times  and  places  ;  the  loss  but 
temporary,  and  owing  its  very  being  to  vice  or  ignorance,  vanishes 
at  the  approach  of  knowledge  and  moral  improvement.  The 
gain  reaches  all  good  men,  belongs  to  all  that  love  light  and  de- 

*  Avolcnt,  quantum  volcnt,  palece  leves  Jldci  quocnngue  afflatu  tentationum  I 
eo  purior  mcatsa  fntmenti  in  horrea  Domini  reponetur.  DC  Prescript,  ad- 
voi-8.  Hteretic.  I.  c.  3. — Ed 

\  Aergernixs  kin,  Acrgerni&x  her!  Noth  briclit,  Ei&en,  nnd  hat  kcin 
Aergernixs.  Ich  soil  der  xchwachen  Gcwisscn  xchonen  so  fern  es  ohnc  Gcfahr 
meiner  Seclen  geschehen  mag.  Wo  nicht,  no  soil  ich  meiner  Seelcn  ralhe?i,  €3 
aergere  sich  daran  die  ganze  odcr  halbe  Welt. 


66  THE    FRIEND. 

sire  an  increase  of  light  :  to  all  .and  of  all  times,  who  thank 
Heaven  for  the  gracious  dawn,  and  expect  the  noon-day  ;  who 
welcome  the  first  gleams  of  spring,  and  sow  their  fields  in  confi 
dent  faith  of  the  ripening  summer  and  the  rewarding  harvest- 
tide  !  But  the  loss  is  confined  to  the  unenlightened  and  the 
prejudiced  —  say  rather,  to  the  weak  and  the  prejudiced  of  a  sin 
gle  generation.  The  prejudices  of  one  age  are  condemned  even 
by  the  prejudiced  of  the  succeeding  ages  :  for  endless  are  ihe 
modes  of  folly,  and  the  fool  joins  with  the  wife  in  passing  sen 
tence  on  all  modes  but  his  own.  Who  cried  out  with  greater 
horror  against  the  murderers  of  the  Prophets,  than  those  who 
likewise  cried  out,  Crucify  him  !  Crucify  him  !  —  Prophet  and 
Saviour,  and  Lord  of  life,  Crucify  him  !  Crucify  him  !  —  The 
truth-haters  of  every  future  generation  will  call  the  truth-haters 
of  the  preceding  ages  by  their  true  names  :  for  even  these  the 
stream  of  time  carries  onward.  In  fine,  truth  considered  in  itself 
and  in  the  effects  natural  to  it,  may  be  conceived  as  a  gentle 
spring  or  water-source,  warm  from  the  genial  earth,  and  breath 
ing  up  into  the  snow  drift  that  is  piled  over  and  around  its  outlet. 
It  turns  the  obstacle  into  its  own  form  and  character,  and  as  it 
makes  its  way  increases  its  stream.  And  should  it  be  arrested  in 
its  course  by  a  chilling  season,  it  suffers  delay,  not  loss,  and  waits 
only  for  a  chairge  in  the  wind  to  awaken  and  again  roll  onwards  :  — 


i  pantori 
Bui  Vesolo  ncvoso 
Fatti  curvi  e  canuti, 
Tf  alto  stupor  son  muti, 
Miranda  al  fonte  ombroso 
11  Po  con  pocln  umori  ; 
Poscia  udendo  gli  onori 
Dell'  urna  anguata  e  stretta, 
Che  Y  Adda,  die  I  Teaino 
Soverchia  in  suo  cammino, 
Che  ampio  al  mar  's  affretta, 
Che  si  xpuma,  e  si  suona, 
Che  gli  si  da  corona  !* 


*  Chiabrera  Rime,  xxviii.  "But  falsehood,"  continues  Mr.  C.,  "is  fire  in 
stubble  ;  it  likewise  turns  all  the  light  stuffs  around  it  into  its  own  sub 
stance  for  a  moment,  one  crackling  blazing  moment,  —  and  then  dies;  and  all 
its  converts  are  scattered  in  the  wind,  without  place  or  evidence  of  their 
existence,  as  viewless  as  the  wind  which  scatters  them." 


ESSAY    IX.  GT 

'  The  simple  shepherds  grown  bent  and  hoary-headed  on  the 
snowy  Vesolo,  are  mute  with  deep  astonishment,  gazing  in  the 
overshadowed  ibuutain  on  the  Po  with  his  scanty  waters  :  then 
hearing  of  the  honors  of  his  confined  and  narrow  urn,  how  he 
receives  as  a  sovereign  the  ADDA  and  the  TESINO  in  his  course, 
how  ample  he  hastens  on  to  the  sea,  how  he  foams,  how  mighty 
his  voice,  and  that  to  him  the  crown  is  assigned.' 


ESSAY    IX. 

Great  men  have  liv'd  among  us,  heads  that  plann'd 
•  And  tongues  that  utter'd  wisdom — better  none. 

***** 
Even  so  doth  Heaven  protect  us  !  WORDSWORTH. 

IN  the  preceding  essay  I  have  explained  the  good,  that  is,  the 
natural  consequences  of  the  promulgation  to  all  of  truths  which 
all  are  bound  to  know  and  to  make  known.  The  evils  occasioned 
by  it,  with  few  arid  rare  exceptions,  have  their  origin  in  the  at 
tempts  to  suppress  or  pervert  it  ;  in  the  fury  and  violence  of  im 
posture  attacked  or  undermined  in  her  strongholds,  or  in  the  ex 
travagances  of  ignorance  and  credulity  roused  from  their  lethargy, 
and  angry  at  the  medicinal  disturbance — awaking,  not  yet  broad 
awake,  and  thus  blending  the  monsters  of  uneasy  dreams  with 
the  real  objects,  on  which  the-  drowsy  eye  had  alternately  half- 
opened  and  closed,  again  half-opened  arid  again  closed.  This 
re-action  of  deceit  and  superstition,  with  all  the  trouble  and  tu 
mult  incident,  I  would  compare  to  a  fire  which  bursts  forth  from 
some  stifled  arid  fermenting  mass  on  the  first  admission  of  light 
and  air.  It  roars  and  blazes,  and  converts  the  already  spoilt  or 
damaged  stuff,  with  all  the  straw  and  straw-like  matter  near  it, 
first  into  flame,  and  the  next  moment  into  ashes.  The  fire  dies 
away,  the  ashes  are  scattered  011  all  the  winds,  and  what  began 
in  worthlessness  ends  in  nothingness.  Such  are  the  evil,  that  is, 
the  casual  consequences  of  the  same  promulgation. 

It  argues  a  narrow  or  corrupt  nature  to  lose  sight  of  the  gen 
eral  and  lasting  consequences  of  rare  and  virtuous  energy,  in  the 


68  THE    FRIEND. 

brief  accidents  which  accompanied  its  first  movements — to  set 
lightly  by  the  emancipation  of  the  human  reason  from  a  legion 
of  devils,  in  our  complaints  and  lamentations  over  the  loss  of  a 
herd  of  swine  !  The  Cranmers,  Hampderis,  and  Sidneys, — the 
counsellors  of  our  Elizabeth^and  the  friends  of  our  other  great 
deliverer,  the  third  William, — is  it  in  vain  that  these  have  been 
our  countrymen  ?  Are  we  not  the  heirs  of  their  good  deeds  ? 
And  what  are  noble  deeds  but  noble  truths  realized  ?  As  Prot 
estants,  as  Englishmen,  as  the  inheritors  of  so  ample  an  estate 
of  might  and  right,  an  estate  so  strongly  fenced,  so  richly  planted, 
by  the  sinewy  arms  arid  dauntless  hearts  of  our  forefathers,  we 
of  all  others  have  good  cause  to  trust  in  the  truth,  yea,  to  follow 
its  pillar  of  fire  through  the  darkness  and  the  desert,  even  though 
'*,s  light  should  but  suffice  to  make  us  certain  of  its  own  presence. 
if  there  be  elsewhere  men  jealous  of  the  light,  who  prophesy  an 
excess  of  evil  over  good  from  its  manifestation,  we  are  entitled  to 
ask  them,  on  what  experience  they  ground  their  bodings  ?  Our 
own  country  bears  no  traces,  our  own  history  contains  no  records 
to  justify  them.  From  the  great  seras  of  national  illumination 
we  date  the  commencement  of  our  main  national  advantages. 
The  tangle  of  delusions  which  stifled  and  distorted  the  growing 
tree,  have  been  torn  away  ;  the  parasite  weeds,  that  fed  on  its 
very  roots,  have  been  plucked  up  with  a  salutary  violence.  To 
us  there  remain  only  quiet  duties,  the  constant  care,  the  gradual 
improvement,  the  cautious,  unhazardous  labors  of  the  industrious 
though  contented  gardener — to  prune,  to  engraft,  and  one  by  one 
to  remove  from  its  leaves  and  fresh  shoots  the  slug  and  the  cater 
pillar.  But  far  be  it  from  us  to  undervalue  with  light  and  sense 
less  detraction  the  conscientious  hardihood  of  our  predecessors,  or 
even  to  condemn  in  them  that  vehemence,  to  which  the  blessings 
it  won  for  us  leave  us  now  neither  temptation  nor  pretext.  That 
the  very  terms,  with  which  the  bigot  or  the  hireling  would  black 
en  the  first  publishers  of  political  and  religious  truth,  are,  and  de 
serve  to  be,  hateful  to  us,  we  owe  to  the  effects  of  its  publication. 
We  ante-date  the. feelings  in  order  to  criminate  the  authors  of 
our  tranquillity,  opulence,  and  security.  But  let  us  be  aware. 
Effects  will  not,  indeed,  immediately  disappear  with  their  causes  ; 
but  neither  can  they  long  continue  without  them.  If  by  the  re 
ception  of  truth  in  the  spirit  of  truth,  we  became  what  we  are  ; 
only  by  the  retention  of  it  in  the  same  spirit,  can  we  remain  what 


ESSAY    X.  69 

we  are.  The  narrow  seas  that  form  our  boundaries, — what  were 
they  in  times  of  old  ?  The  convenient  highway  for  Danish  and 
Norman  pirates.  What  are  they  now  ?  Still  but  "  a  span  of 
waters."  Yet  they  roll  at  the  base  of  the  misled  Ararat,  on 
which  the  ark  of  the  hope  of  Europe  and  of  civilization  rested  ! 

Even  so  doth  God  protect  us,  if  we  be 

Virtuous  and  wise.     Winds  blow  and  waters  roll, 

Strength  to  the  brave,  and  power  and  deity  : 

Yet  in  themselves  are  nothing  !     One  decree 

Spake  laws  to  them,  and  said  that  by  the  soul 

Only  the  nations  shall  be  great  and  free  1  WORDSWORTH. 


ESSAY    X. 

I  deny  not  but  that  it  is  of  greatest  concernment  in  the  church  and  com 
monwealth  to  have  a  vigilant  eye  how  books  demean  themselves  as  well 
as  men  ;  and  thereafter  to  confine,  imprison,  and  do  sharpest  justice  on 
them  as  malefactors.  For  books  are  not  absolutely  dead  things,  but  do  con 
tain  a  potency  of  life  in  them  to  be  as  active  as  that  soul  was  whose  pro 
geny  they  are ;  nay,  they  do  preserve  as  in  a  vial  the  purest  efficacy  and 
extraction  of  that  living  intellect  that  bred  them.  I  know  they  are  as  lively 
and  as  vigorously  productive  as  those  fabulous  dragon's  teeth :  and  being 
sown  up  and  down  may  chance  to  spring  up  armed  men.  And  yet  on  the 
other  hand,  unless  wariness  be  used,  as  good  almost  kill  a  man  as  kill  a 
good  book.  Who  kills  a  man,  kills  a  reasonable  creature,  God's  image  ;  but 
he  who  destroys  a  good  book,  kills  reason  itself,  kills  the  image  of  God,  as 
it  were  in  the  eye.  Many  a  man  lives  a  burthen  to  the  earth  ;  but  a  good 
book  is  the  precious  life-blood  of  a  master-spirit,  embalmed  and  treasured 
up  on  purpose  to  a  life  beyond  life. 

MILTON'S  Speech  for  the  liberty  of  unlicensed  printing. 

THUS  far  then  I  have  been  conducting  a  TO.USC  between  an  in 
dividual  and  his  own  mind.  Proceeding  on  the  conviction,  that 
to  man  is  intrusted  the  nature,  not  the  result,  of  his  actions,  I 
have  presupposed  no  calculations  ;  I  have  presumed  no  foresight. 
— Introduce  no  contradiction  into  thy  own  consciousness.  Act 
ing,  or  abstaining  from  action,  delivering  or  withholding  thy 
thoughts,  whatsoever  thou  doest,  do  it  in  singleness  of  heart.  In 
all  things,  therefore,  let  thy  njeans  correspond  to  thy  purpose,  arid 
let  the  purpose  be  one  with  the  purport. — To  this  principle  I  have 


70  THE    FKIEND. 

referred  the  supposed  individual,  and  from  this  principle  solely  I . 
have  deduced  each  particular  of  his  conduct.  As  far,  therelbre, 
as  the  court  of  conscience  extends, — and  in  this  court  alone  I  have 
been  pleading  hitherto — I  have  won  the  cause.  It  has  been  de 
cided,  that  there  is  no  just  ground  for  apprehending  mischief  from 
truth  communicated  conscientiously, — that  is,  with  a  strict  obser 
vance  of  all  the  conditions  required  by  the  conscience  ; — that 
what  is  not  so  communicated,  is  falsehood,  and  that  to  the  false 
hood,  not  to  the  truth,  must  the  ill  consequences  be  attributed. 

Another  and  altogether  different  cause  remains  now  to  be 
pleaded  ;  a  different  cause,  and  in  a  different  court.  The  parties 
concerned  are  no  longer  the  well-meaning  individual  and  his 
conscience,  but  the  citizen  and  the  state — the  citizen,  who  may 
be  a  fanatic  as  probably  as  a  philosopher,  and  the  state,  which 
concerns  itself  with  the  conscience  only  as  far  as  it  appears  in  the 
action,  or  still  more  accurately,  in  the  fact  ;  and  which  must  de 
termine  the  nature  of  the  fact  not  merely  by  a  rule  of  right 
formed  from  the  modification  of  particular  by  general  conse 
quences, — not  merely  by  a  principle  of  compromise,  that  reduces 
the  freedom  of  each  citizen  to  the  common  measure  in  which  it 
becomes  compatible  with  the  freedom  of  all  ;  but  likewise  by  the 
relation  which  the  facts  bear  to  its — the  state's — own  instinctive 
principle  of  self-preservation.  For  every  depository  of  the  su 
preme  power  must  presume  itself  rightful :  and  as  the  source  of 
law  not  legally  to  be  endangered.  A  form  of  government  may 
indeed,  in  reality,  be  most  pernicious  to  the  governed,  and  the 
highest  moral  honor  may  await  the  patriot  who  risks  his  life  in 
order  by  its  subversion  to  introduce  a  better  and  juster  constitu 
tion  ;  but  it  would  be  absurd  to  blame  the  law  by  which  his  life 
is  declared  forfeit.  It  were  to  expect,  that  by  an  involved  con 
tradiction  the  law  sjjpuld  allow  itself  not  to  be  law,  by  allowing 
the  state,  of  which  it  is  a  part,  not  to  be  a  state.  For,  as  Hooker 
has  well  observed,  the  law  of  men's  actions  is  one,  if  they  be  re 
spected  only  as  men  ;  and  another,  when  they  are  considered  as 
parts  of  a  body  politic.* 

But  though  every  government  subsisting  in  law, — for  pure  law 
less  despotism  grounding  itself  wholly  on  terror  precludes  all  con 
sideration  of  duty — though  every  government  subsisting  in  law 
must,  and  ought  to,  regard  itself  as  the  life  of  the  body  politic,  of 
*  Eccl.  Pol.  I.  xvi.  6.— Ed. 


ESSAY    X.  71 

which  it  is  the  head,  and  consequently  must  punish  every  attempt 
against  itself  as  an  act  of  assault  or  murder,  that  is,  sedition  or 
treason  ;  yet  still  it  ought  so  to  secure  the  life  as  not  to  prevent 
the  conditions  of  its  growth,  and  of  that  adaptation  to  circum 
stances,  without  which  its  very  life  becomes  insecure.  In  the 
application,  therefore,  of  these  principles  to  the  public  communi 
cation  of  opinions  by  the  most  efficient  mean, — we  have  to  decide, 
whether  consistently  with  them  there  should  be  any  liberty  of  the 
press  ;  and  if  this  be  answered  in  the  affirmative,  what  shall  be 
declared  abuses  of  that  liberty,  and  made  punishable  as  such ; 
and  in  what  way  the  general  law  shall  be  applied  to  each  par 
ticular  case. 

First,  then,  ought  there  to  be  any  liberty  of  the  press  ?  I  do 
not  here  mean,  whether  it  should  be  permitted  to  print  books  at 
all ; — for  this  essay  has  little  chance  of  being  read  in  Turkey,  and 
in  any  other  part  of  Europe  it  can  not  be  supposed  questionable — 
but  whether  by  the  appointment  of  a  censorship  the  government 
should  take  upon  itself  the  responsibility  of  each  particular  publi 
cation.  In  governments  purely  monarchical, — that  is,  oligarchies 
under  one  head — the  balance  of  advantage  and  disadvantage  from 
this  monopoly  of  the  press  will  undoubtedly  be  affected  by  the 
general  state  of  information ;  though  after  reading  Milton's 
'  Speech  for  the  liberty  of  unlicensed  printing'*  we  shall  proba 
bly  be  inclined  to  believe,  that  the  best  argument  in  favor  of  li 
censing  under  any  constitution  is  that,  which  supposing  the  ruler 
to  have  a  different  interest  from  that  of  his  country,  and  even 
from  himself  as  a  reasonable  and  moral  creature,  grounds  itself 
on  the  incompatibility  of  knowledge  with  folly,  oppression,  and 
degradation.  What  our  prophetic  Harrington  said  of  religious, 
applies  equally  to  literary,  toleration  : — "  If  it  be  said  that  in 
France  there  is  liberty  of  conscience  in  part,  it  is  also  plain  that 
while  the  hierarchy  is  standing,  this  liberty  is  falling,  and  that  if 
ever  it  comes  to  pull  down  the  hierarchy,  it  pulls  down  that 
monarchy  also  :  wherefore  the  monarchy  or  hierarchy  will  be 

*  11  y  a  un  voile  qui  dolt  toujours  couvrir  tout  ce  que  Ton  pent  dire  et 
tout  ce  qu'on  pent  croire  du  droit  dcs  pevples  et  de  celui  des  princes,  qui  nc 
s'accordentjamais  si  bien  ensemble  que  dans  le  silence. 

Mem.  du  Card,  dc  Retz. 

How  severe  a  satire  where  it  can  be  justly  applied  !  how  false  and  ca- 
vumnious  if  meant  as  a  general  maxim  1 


72  THE    FRIEND. 

beforehand  with  it,  if  they  see  their  true  interest."^ — On  the 
other  hand,  there  is  no  slight  danger  from  general  ignorance : 
and  the  only  choice,  which  Providence  has  graciously  left  to  a 
vicious  government,  is  either  to  fall  by  the  people,  if  they  are 
suffered  to  become  enlightened,  or  with  them,  if  they  are  kept 
enslaved  and  ignorant. 

The  nature  of  our  -constitution,  since  the  Revolution,  the  state 
of  our  literature  and  the  wide  diffusion,  if  not  of  intellectual,  yet 
of  literary,  power,  and  the  almost  universal  interest  in  the  pro 
ductions  of  literature,  have  set  the  question  at  rest  relatively  to 
the  British  press.  However  great  the  advantages  of  previous  ex 
amination  might  be  under  other  circumstances,  in  this  country  it 
would  be  both  impracticable  and  inefficient.  I  need  only  sug 
gest  in  broken  sentences — the  prodigious  number  of  licensers  that 
would  be  requisite — the  variety  of  their  attainments,  and — inas 
much  as  the  scheme  must  be  made  consistent  with  our  religious 
freedom — the  ludicrous  variety  of  their  principles  and  creeds — 
their  number  being  so  great,  and  each  appointed  censor  being 
himself  a  man  of  letters,  quis  custodiet  ipsos  custodes  ?  If  these 
numerous  licensers  hold  their  offices  for  life,  and  independently 
of  the  ministry  pro  tempore,  a  new,  heterogeneous,  and  alarming 
power  is  introduced,  which  can  never  be  assimilated  to  the  con 
stitutional  powers  already  existing  : — if  they  'are  removable  at 
pleasure,  that  which  is  heretical  and  seditious  in  1809,  may  be 
come  orthodox  and  loyal  in  1810  ; — and  what  man,  whose  at 
tainments  and  moral  respectability  gave  him  even  an  endurable 
claim  to  this  awful  trust,  would  accept  a  situation  at  once  so  in 
vidious  and  so  precarious  ?  And  what  institution  can  retain  any 
useful  influence  in  so  free  a  nation  when  its  abuses  have  made  it 
contemptible  ?  Lastly,  and  which  of  itself  would  suffice  to  justify 
the  rejection  of  such  a  plan — unless  all  proportion  between  crime 
and  punishment  were  abandoned,  what  penalties  could  the  law 
attach  to  the  assumption  of  a  liberty,  which  it  had  denied,  more 
severe  than  those  which  it  now  attaches  to  the  abuse  of  the  lib 
erty,  which  it  grants  ?  In  all  those  instances  at  least,  which  it 
would  be  most  the  inclination — perhaps  the  duty — of  the  state 
to  prevent,  namely,  in  seditious  and  incendiary  publications, — 
(whether  actually  such,  or  only  such  as  the  existing  government 
chose  so  to  denominate,  makes  no  difference  in  the  argument)* 
*  Syat.  of  Politics,  vi.  1  Q.—Ed. 


ESSAY    X.  73 

the  publisher,  who  hazards  the  punishment  now  assigned  to  sedi 
tious  publications,  would  assuredly  hazard  the  penalties  of  un 
licensed  ones,  especially  as  the  very  practice  of  licensing  would 
naturally  diminish  the  attention  to  the  contents  of  the  works 
published,  the  chance  of  impunity  therefore  be  so  much  greater, 
and  the  artifice  of  prefixing  an  unauthorized  license  so  likely  to 
escape  detection.  It  is  a  fact,  that  in  many  of  the  former  German 
states  in  which  literature  flourished,  notwithstanding  the  estab 
lishment  of  censors  or  licensers,  three  fourths  of  the  books  printed 
were  unlicensed — even  those,  the  contents  of  which  were  unob 
jectionable,  and  where  the  sole  motive  for  evading  the  law,  must 
have  been  either  the  pride  and  delicacy  of  the  author,  or  the  in 
dolence  of  the  bookseller.  So  difficult  was  the  detection,  so  vari 
ous  the  means  of  evasion,  and  worse  than  all,  from  the  nature  of 
the  law  and  the  affront  it  offers  to  the  pride  of  human  nature, 
such  was  the  merit  attached  to  the  breach  of  it — a  merit  com 
mencing  perhaps  with  Luther's  Bible,  and  other  prohibited  works 
of  similar  great  minds,  published  with  no  dissimilar  purpose,  and 
thence  by  many  an  intermediate  link  of  association  finally  con 
nected  with  books,  of  the  very  titles  of  which  a  good  man  would 
wish  to  remain  ignorant.  The  interdictory  catalogues  of  the  Ro 
mish  hierarchy  always  present  to  my  fancy  the  muster-rolls  of 
the  two  hostile  armies  of  Michael  and  of  Satan  printed  promis 
cuously,  or  extracted  at  haphazard,  save  only  that  the  extracts 
from  the  former  appear  somewhat  the  more  numerous.  And  yet 
even  in  Naples,  and  in  Rome  itself,  whatever  difficulty  occurs  in 
procuring  any  article  catalogued  in  these  formidable  folios,  must 
arise  either  from  the  scarcity  of  the  work  itself,  or  the  absence  of 
all  interest  in  it.  Assuredly  there  is  no  difficulty  in  obtaining 
from  the  most  respectable  booksellers  the  vilest  provocatives  to 
the  basest  crimes,  though  intermixed  with  gross  lampoons  on  the 
heads  of  the  church,  the  religious  orders,  and  on  religion  itself. 
The  stranger  is  invited  into  an  inner  room,  and  the  proscribed 
wares  presented  to  him  with  most  significant  looks  and  gestures, 
implying  the  hazard,  and  the  necessity  of  secrecy.  A  creditable 
English  bookseller  would  deem  himself  insulted,  if  such  works 
were  even  inquired  after  at  his  shop.  It  is  a  well-known  fact, 
that  with  the  mournful  exception  indeed  of  political  provocatives, 
and  the  titillations  of  vulgar  envy  provided  by  our  anonymous 
critics,  the  loathsome  articles  are  among  us  vended  and  offered 

VOL.  II.  D 


74  THE    FRIEND. 

for  sale  almost  exclusively  by  foreigners.  Such  arc  the 
effects  of  a  free  press,  and  the  generous  habit  of  action  imbiber) 
from  the  blessed  air  of  law  and  liberty,  even  by  men  who  neither 
understand  the  principle,  nor  feel  the  sentiment,  of  the  dignified 
purity,  to  which  they  yield  obeisance  from  the  instinct  of  charac 
ter.  As  there  is  a  national  guilt  which  can  be  charged  but 
gently  on  each  individual*  so  are  there  national  virtues,  which 
can  as  little  be  imputed  to  the  individuals, — nowhere,  however, 
but  in  countries  where  liberty  is  the  presiding  influence,  the  uni 
versal  medium  and  menstruum  of  all  other  excellence,  moral 
and  intellectual.  Admirably  doth  the  admirable  Petrarch  ad 
monish  us  : — 

Nee  sibi  vcro  quisquamfaho  pcrsuadeat,  eos  qui  pro  libertate 
excnbant,  atquc  hactenus  desertce  reipufilicce  partes  suscipiunt, 
alienuni  agere  negotium  ;  suum  agunt.  In  liac  una  repnsita 
sibi  omnia  norint  omnes,  securitatem  mcrcator.  gloriam  mile*, 
utilitatem  agricola.  Postrcmo,  in  eadem  religiosi  ccerimomas, 
otium  studiosi,  requiem  senes,  rudiment  a  discdplinarum  pi/eri, 
nuptiaspuellce,pudicitiam  matrons,  gaudium  omnes.  invenient. 
#  *  x  *  Huic  unireliquce,  cedant  curcc  !  Si  hanc  omittitis,  in 
quantalibet  occupations  nihil  agitis :  si  hide  incumbitis,  etsi 
niliil  agere  videmini,  cumulate  tamcn  et  civium  et  virorum  im- 
plevistis  officia* 

Nor  let  any  one  falsely  persuade  himself,  that  those  who  keep 
watch  and  ward  for  liberty,  are  meddling  with  things  that  do 
not  concern  them,  instead  of  minding  their  own  business.  For 
all  men  should  know,  that  all  blessings  are  stored  and  protected 
in  this  one,  as  in  a  common  repository.  Here  is  the  tradesman's 
security,  the  soldier's  honor,  the  agriculturist's  profit.  Lastly,  in 
this  one  good  of  liberty  the  religious  will  find  the  permission  of 
their  rites  and  forms  of  worship,  the  students  their  learned  leisure, 
the  aged  their  repose,  boys  the  rudiments  of  the  several  branches 
of  their  education,  maidens  their  chaste  nuptials,  matrons  their 
womanly  honor  and  the  dignity  of  their  modesty,  fathers  of  fami 
lies  the  dues  of  natural  affection  and  the  sacred  privileges  of  their 
ancient  home,  every  one  their  hope  and  their  joy.  To  this  one 

*  Petrarch.  Epist,  45,  ad  Nicolaum  tribunum  urbis  almtz  novissimum  et 
adpopulum  Romanum.  The  translation  contains  clauses  referring  to  ex 
pressions,  which  in  the  second  edition,  were  inserted  in  the  Latin  quotation 
by  Mr.  C.  himself. — Ed. 


ESSAY    XI.  75 

solicitude,  therefore,  let  all  other  cares  yield  the  priority.  If  you 
omit  this,  be  occupied  as  much  and  sedulously  as  you  may,  you 
are  doing  nothing  :  If  you  apply  your  heart  and  strength  to  this, 
though  you  seem  to  be  doing  nothing,  you  will,  nevertheless, 
have  been  fulfilling  the  duties  of  citizens  and  of  men,  yea,  in  a 
measure  pressed  down  and  running  over. 

I  quote  Petrarch  often  iu  the  hope  of  drawing  the  attention  of  scholars  to 
his  inestimable  Latin  writings.  Let  me  add,  in  the  wish  likewise  of  recom 
mending  to  the  London  publishers  a  translation  of  select  passages  from  his 
treatises  and  letters.  If  I  except  the  German  writings  and  original  letters 
of  the  heroic  Luther,  I  do  not  remember  a  work  from  which  so  delightful 
and  instructive  a  volume  might  be  compiled. 

To  give  the  true  bent  to  the  above  extract,  it  is  necessary  to  bear  in  mind, 
that  he  who  keeps  watch  and  ward  for  freedom,  has  to  guard  against  two 
enemies,  the  despotism  of  the  few  and  the  despotism  of  the  many — but  espe 
cially  in  the  present  day  against  the  sycophants  of  the  populace. 
License  they  mean,  when  they  cry  liberty  1 
For  who  loves  that,  must  first  be  wise  and  good. 


ESSAY    XI. 

Nemo  vero  fallatur,  quasi  minorasint  animorwn  contagia  quam  corporum. 
Majora  sunt ;  gravius  Iccdunt ;  altius  descendant,  serpuntque  latentius. 

PETRARCH.  De  Vit.  Solit.  L.  1.  tract.  3.  e.  4. 

And  let  no  man  be  deceived  as  if  the  contagions  of  the  soul  were  less  than 
those  of  the  body.  They  are  yet  greater  ;  they  convey  more  direful  dis 
eases  ;  they  sink  deeper,  and  creep  on  more  unsuspectedly. 

WE  have  abundant  reason  then  to  infer,  that  the  law  of  Eng 
land  has  done  well  and  concluded  wisely  in  proceeding  on  the 
principle  so  clearly  worded  by  Milton  :  "  that  a  book  should  be 
as  freely  admitted  into  the  world  as  any  other  birth  ;  and  if  it 
prove  a  monster,  who  denies  but  that  it  may  justly  be  burnt  or 
sunk  into  the  sea  ? ' '  We  have  reason  then,  I  repeat,  to  rest  sat 
isfied  with  our  laws,  which  no  more  prevent  a  book  from  coming 
into  the  world  unlicensed,  lest  it  should  prove  a  libel,  than  a 
traveller  from  passing  unquestioned  through  our  turnpike-gates, 
because  it  is  possible  he  may  be  a  highwayman.  Innocence  is 


76  THE    FEIEND. 

presumed  in  both  cases.  The  publication  is  a  part  of  the  offence, 
and  its  necessary  condition.  Words  are  moral  acts,  and  words 
deliberately  made  public  the  law  considers  in  the  same  light  as 
any  other  cognizable  overt  act. 

Here,  however,  a  difficulty  presents  itself.  Theft,  robbery, 
murder,  and  the  like,  are  easily  denned  :  the  degrees  and  circum 
stances  likewise  of  these  and  similar  actions  are  definite,  and 
constitute  specific  offences,  described  and  punishable  each  under 
its  own  name.  We  have  only  to  prove  the  fact  and  identify  the 
offender.  The  intention  too,  in  the  great  majority  of  cases,  is  so 
clearly  implied  in  the  action,  that  the  law  can  safely  adopt  it  as 
its  universal  maxim,  that  the  proof  of  the  malice  is  included  in 
the  proof  of  the  fact ;  especially  as  the  few  occasional  exceptions 
have  their  remedy  provided  in  the  prerogative  of  pardon*  in 
trusted  to  the  supreme  magistrate.  But  in  the  case  of  libel,  the 
degree  makes  the  kind,  the  circumstances  constitute  the  crimi 
nality  ;  and  both  degrees  and  circumstances,  like  the  ascending 
shades  of  color  or  the  shooting  hues  of  a  dove's  neck,  die  away 
into  each  other,  incapable  of  definition  or  outline.  The  eye  of 
the  understanding,  indeed,  sees  the  determinate  difference  in  each 
individual  case,  but  language  is  most  often  inadequate  to  express 
what  the  eye  perceives,  much  less  can  a  general  statute  antici 
pate  and  pre-define  it.  Again  :  in  other  overt  acts  a  charge  dis 
proved  leaves  the  accused  either  guilty  of  a  different  fault,  or  at 
best  simply  blameless.  A  man  having  killed  a  fellow-citizen  is 
acquitted  of  murder  ; — the  act  was  manslaughter  only,  or  it  was 
justifiable  homicide.  But  when  we  reverse  the  iniquitous  sen 
tence  passed  on  Algernon  Sidney,  during  our  perusal  of  his  work 
on  government ;  at  the  moment  we  deny  it  to  have  been  a  traitor 
ous  libel,  our  beating  hearts  declare  it  to  have  been  a  benefaction 
to  our  country,  and  under  the  circumstances  of  those  times  the 
performance  of  an  heroic  duty.  From  this  cause,  therefore, 
as  well  as  from  a  libel's  being  a  thing  made  up  of  degrees  and 
circumstances, — and  these  too,  discriminating  offence  from  merit 
by  such  dim  and  ambulant  boundaries, — the  intention  of  the 
agent,  wherever  it  can  be  independently  or  inclusively  ascertained, 
must  be  allowed  a  great  share  in  determining  the  character  of 
the  action,  unless  the  law  is  not  only  to  be  divorced  from  moral 
justice,  but  to  wage  open  hostility  against  it.* 
*  According  to  the  old  adage :  you  are  not  hanged  for  stealing  a  horse, 


ESSAY    XI.  77 

Add  too,  that  laws  in  doubtful  points  are  to  be  interpreted 
according-  to  the  design  of  the  legislator,  where  this  can  be  cer 
tainly  inferred.  But  the  laws  of  England,  which  owe  their  own 
present  supremacy  and  absoluteness  to  the  good  sense  and  gener 
ous  dispositions  diffused  by  the  press  more,  far  more,  than  to  any 
other  single  cause,  must  needs  be  presumed  favorable  to  its  gen 
eral  influence.  Even  in  the  penalties  attached  to  its  abuse,  we 
must  suppose  the  legislature  to  have  been  actuated  by  the  de 
sire  of  preserving  its  essential  privileges.  The  press  is  indiffer 
ently  the  passive  instrument  of  evil  and  of  good  :  nay,  there  is  some 
good  even  in  its  evil.  "  Good  and  evil  we  know,"  says  Milton, 
in  the  Speech  from  which  I  have  selected  the  motto  of  the  pre 
ceding  essay,  "  in  the  field  of  this  world,  grow  up  together  al 
most  inseparably  :  and  the  knowledge  of  good  is  so  involved  and 
interwoven  with  the  knowledge  of  evil,  and  in  so  many  cunning 
resemblances  hardly  to  be  discerned,  that  those  confused  seeds 
which  were  imposed  on  Psyche  as  an  incessant  labor  to  cull  out 
and  sort  asunder,  were  not  more  intermixed." — "  As,  therefore, 
the  state  of  man  now  is,  what  wisdom  can  there  be  to  choose, 
what  continence  to  forbear,  without  the  knowledge  of  evil  ?  He 
that  can  ^apprehend  and  consider  vice  with  all  her  baits  and 
seeming  pleasures,  and  yet  abstain,  and  yet  distinguish,  and  yet 
prefer  that  which  is  truly  better,  he  is  the  true  way-faring 
Christian.  I  can  not  praise  a  fugitive  and  cloistered  virtue,  un- 
exercised  and  unbreathed,  that  never  sallies  out  and  see.s  her  ad 
versary." — "That  virtue,  therefore,  which  is  but  a  youngling 
in  the  contemplation  of  evil,  and  knows  not  the  utmost  that 
vice  promises  to  her  followers,  and  rejects  it,  is  but  a  blank  virtue, 
not  a  pure." — "  Since,  therefore,  the  knowledge  and  survey  of 
vice  is  in  this  world  so  necessary  to  the  constituting  of  human 
virtue,  and  the  scanning  of  error  to  the  confirmation  of  truth,  how 
can  we  more  safely  and  with  less  danger  scout  into  the  regions 
of  sin  and  falsity,  than  by  reading  all  manner  of  tractates,  and 
hearing  all  manner  of  reason?" — Again — but,  indeed  the  whole 
treatise  is  one  strain  of  moral  wisdom  and  political  prudence  : — 
"  Why  should  we  then  affect  a  rigor  contrary  to  the  manner  of 
God  and  of  nature,  by  abridging  or  scanting  those  means,  which 
books,  freely  permitted,  are  both  to  the  trial  of  virtue  and  the 

but  that  horses  may  not  be  stolen.     To  what  extent  this  is  true,  I  shall  have 
occasion  to  examine  hereafter. 


78  THE    FRIEND. 

exercise  of  truth  ?  It  would  be  better  done  to  learn,  that  the  law 
must  needs  be  frivolous,  which  goes  to  restrain  things  uncertainly, 
and  yet  equally,  working  to  good  and  to  evil.  Arid  were  I  the 
chooser,  a  dram  of  well-doing  should  be  preferred  before  many 
times  as  much  the  forcible  hindrance  of  evil-doing.  For  God, 
sure,  esteems  the  growth  and  completion  of  one  virtuous  person, 
more  than  the  restraint  of  ten  vicious." 

The  evidence  of  history  is  strong  in  favor  of  the  same  princi 
ples,  even  in  respect  of  their  expediency.  The  average  result 
of  the  press  from  Henry  VIII.  to  Charles  1.  was  such  a  diffusion 
of  religious  light  as  first  redeemed  and  afterwards  saved  this  na 
tion  from  the  spiritual  and  moral  death  of  Popery  ;  and  in"  the 
following  period  it  is  to  the  press  that  we  owe  the  gradual  as 
cendency  of  those  wise  political  maxims,  which  casting  philo 
sophic  truth  in  the  moulds  of  national  laws,  customs,  and  exist 
ing  orders  of  society,  subverted  the  tyranny  Avithout  suspending 
the  government,  and  at  length  completed  the  mild  and  salutary 
revolution  by  the  establishment  of  the  house  of  Brunswick.  To 
what  must  we  attribute  this  vast  over-balance  of  good  in  the 
general  effects  of  the  press,  but  to  the  over-balance  of  virtuous 
intention  in  those  who  employed  the  press  ?  The  law,  there 
fore,  will  not  refuse  to  manifest  good  intention  a  certain  weight 
even  in  cases  of  apparent  error,  lest  it  should  discourage  and 
scare  away  those,  to  whose  efforts  we  owe  the  comparative  in- 
frequency  and  weakness  of  error  on  the  whole.  The  law  may, 
however,  nay,  it  must  demand,  that  the  external  proofs  of  the 
author's  honest  intentions  should  be  supported  by  the  general 
style  and  matter  of  his  work,  and  by  the  circumstances  and  mode 
of  its  publication.  A  passage,  which  in  a  grave  and  regular  dis 
quisition  would  be  blameless,  might  become  highly  libellous  and 
justly  punishable  if  it  were  applied  to  present  measures  or  per 
sons  for  immediate  purposes,  in  a  cheap  and  popular  tract.  I 
have  seldom  felt  greater  indignation  than  at  finding  in  a  large 
manufactory  a  sixpenny  pamphlet,  containing  a  selection  of  in 
flammatory  paragraphs  from  the  prose-writings  of  Milton,  with 
out  a  hint  given  of  the  time,  occasion,  state  of  government,  and 
other  circumstances  under  which  they  were  written — not  a  hint, 
that  the  freedom  which  we  now  enjoy,  exceeds  all  that  Milton 
dared  hope  for,  or  deemed  practicable  ;  and  that  his  political 
creed  sternly  excluded  the  populace,  and  indeed  the  majority  of 


ESSAY    XL  70 

the  population,  from  all  pretensions  to  political  power.  If  the 
manifest  bad  intention  would  constitute  this  publication  a  sedi 
tious  libel,  a  good  intention  equally  manifest  can  not  justly  be  de 
nied  its  share  of  influence  in  producing  a  contrary  verdict. 

Here  then  is  the  difficulty.  From  the  very  nature  of  a  libel  it 
is  impossible  so  to  define  it,  but  that  the  most  meritorious  works 
will  be  found  included  in  the  description.  Not  from  any  defect 
or  undue  severity  in  the  particular  law,  but  from  the  very  nature 
of  the  offence  to  be  guarded  against,  a  work  recommending  re 
form  by  the  only  rational  mode  of  recommendation,  that  is,  by 
the  detection  and  exposure  of  corruption,  abuse,  or  incapacity, 
might,  though  it  should  breathe  the  best  and  most  unadulterated 
English  feelings,  be  brought  within  the  definition  of  libel  equally 
with  the  vilest  incendiary  pamphlet,  that  ever  aimed  at  leading 
and  misleading  the  multitude.  Not  a  paragraph  in  the  Morning 
Post  during  the  Peace  of  Amiens,  (or  rather  the  experimental 
truce  so  called,) — though  to  the  immortal  honor  of  the  then  edi 
tor,  that  newspaper  was  the  chief  secondary  means  of  producing 
the  unexampled  national  unanimity,  with  which  the  war  re 
commenced  and  has  since  been  continued, — not  a  paragraph 
warning  the  nation,  as  need  was  and  most  imperious  duty  com 
manded,  of  the  perilous  designs  and  •unsleeping  ambition  of  our 
neighbor,  the  mimic  and  caricaturist  of  Charlemagne,  but  was  a 
punishable  libel,  The  law  of  libel  is  a  vast  aviary,  which  en 
cages  the  awakening  cock  arid  the  geese  whose  alarum  preserved 
the  Capitol,  no  less  than  the  babbling  magpie  and  ominous 
screech-owl.  And  yet  will  we  avoid  this  seeming  injustice,  we 
throw  down  all  fence  and  bulwark  of  public  decency  and  public 
opinion  ;  political  calumny  will  soon  join  hands  with  private 
slander  ;  and  every  principle,  every  feeling,  that  binds  the  citizen 
to  his  country  arid  the  spirit  to  its  Creator,  will  be  undermined — 
not  by  reasoning,  for  from  that  there  is  no  danger  ;  but — by  the 
mere  habit  of  hearing  them  reviled  and  scoffed  at  with  impunity. 
Were  we  to  contemplate  the  evils  of  a  rank  and  unweeded  press 
only  in  ils  effect  on  the  manners  of  a  people,  and  on  the  general 
tone  of  thought  and  conversation,  the  greater  the  love  which  we 
bore  1o  literature  and  to  all  the  means  and  instruments  of  human 
improvement,  the  greater  would  be  the  earnestness  with  which 
\ve  should  solicit  the  interference  of  law  :  the  more  anxiously 
should  we  wish  for  some  Ithuriel  spear,  that  might  remove  from 


80  THE    FRIEND. 

the  ear  of  the  public,  and  expose  in  their  own  fiendish   shape 
those  reptiles,  which  inspiring  venom  and  forging  illusions  as 

they  list, 

thence  raise 

At  least  distempered,  discontented  thoughts, 
Vain  hopes,  vain  aims,  inordinate  desires. 

PARADISE  LOST. 


ESSAY  XII. 

Qitomodo  antem  id  futurwn  sit,  ne  guis  incredibile  arbitretur,  ostendam. 
Imprimis  multiplicabitur  regnum,  et  summa  rerum  potestas  per  plurimos 
disnipata  et  concisa  minuetur.  Tune  discordiw  civiles  in  perpetuum  serentur, 
nee  ulla  requies  bellis  cxitialibus  erit,  donee  reyes  dcccm  pariter  exiatant  gut 
orbem  terra,  non  ad  regendum,  scd  ad  consumendum,  partiantur.  Hi  exer- 
citibiis  in  immensum  coactis,  ct  agrorum  cultibns  destitutes,  quod  est  princi- 
pium  cversionis  et  cladis,  diftperdent  omnia,  et  commitment,  ett  vorabunt, 
Turn  repcritc  adverms  eos  Jiostis  potentissimus  ab  extremis  finibu.s  plagcesep- 
tentrionalis  orictiir,  qui  tribus  ex  co  numero  deletia  qui  tune  Asiam  obtine- 
bunt,  assumetur  in  societatcm  /<  cccteri-i,  ac  princeps  omnium  constituetur. 
Hie  insustentabili  dominatione  vcxabit  orbem  ;  divina  ct  hioi^aiia  mixeeMt ; 
infanda  dictu  et  execrabilia  molictur ;  nova  conni/ea  in  pectorc  fttto  volutabit, 
ut  proprium  sibi  constitnat  imperium  ;  leges  commtitabit,  suas  sanciet ;  con- 
taminabit,  diripiet,  spoliabit,  occidet.  De.nique  imnmtato  nomine,  atque  im- 
perii  sede  translata,  confusio  ac  perturbatio  hwnani  generis  consequetur. 
Turn  vere  detestabilc,  atque  abominandum  tempus  existet,  quo  nulli  ]>ominum 
sit  vitajucunda.  LACTANTIUS  de  Vita  Beata,  Lib.  vii.  c.  16. 

But  lest  this  should  be  doomed  incredible,  I  will  show  the  manner  in 
which  it  is  to  take  place.  First,  there  will  be  a  multiplication  of  independ 
ent  sovereignties,  and  the  supreme  magistracy  of  the  empire,  scattered  and 
cut  lip  into  fragments,  will  be  enfeebled  in  the  exercise  of  power  by  Urw 
and  authority.  Then  will  be  sown  the  seeds  of  civil  discords,  nor  will  there 
be  any  rest  or  pause  to  wasteful  and  ruinous  wars ;  while  the  soldiery  kept 
together  in  immense  standing  armies,  the  kings  will  crush  and  lay  waste  at 
their  will ; — until  at  length  there  will  rise  up  against  them  a  most  puissant 
military  chieftain  of  low  birth,  who  will  have  conceded  to  him  a  fellowship 
with  the  other  sovereigns  of  the  earth,  and  will  finally  be  constituted  the 
head  of  all.  This  man  Avill  harass  the  civilized  world  with  an  insupporta 
ble  despotism,  he  will  confound  and  commix  all  things  spiritual  and  tem 
poral.  He  will  form  plans  and  preparations  of  the  most  execrable  and 
sacrilegious  nature.  He  will  be  forever  restlessly  turning  over  new 


ESSAY    XII,  81 

schemes  in  his  imagination,  in  order  that  he  may  fix  the  imperial  power 
over  all  in  his  own  name  and  possession.  He  will  change  the  former  laws, 
he  will  sanction  a  code  of  his  own,  he  will  contaminate,  pillage,  lay  waste 
and  massacre.  At  length,  when  he  has  succeeded  in  the  change  of  names 
and  titles,  and  in  the  transfer  of  the  seat  of  empire,  there  will  follow  a  con 
fusion  and  perturbation  of  the  human  race ;  then  will  there  be  for  a  while 
an  era  of  horror  and  abomination,  during  which  no  man  will  enjoy  his  life 
in  quietness.* 

I  INTERPOSE  this  essay  as  an  historical  comment  on  the  words 
"  mimic  and  caricaturist  of  Charlemagne,"  as  applied  to  the  des 
pot,  whom  since  the  tirue  that  the  words  were  first  printed,  we 
have,  thank  Heaven  !  succeeded  in  encaging.  The  motto  con 
tains  one  of  the  most  striking  instances  of  an  uninspired  prophecy 
fulfilled  even  in  many  of  its  minutice,  that  I  recollect  ever  to 
have  met  with  :  arid  it  is  hoped,  that  as  a  curiosity  it  will  rec 
oncile  my  readers  to  its  unusual  length.  But  .though  my  chief 
motive  was  that  of  relieving,  by  the  variety  of  an  historical  par 
allel,  the  series  of  argument  on  this  most  important  of  all  sub 
jects,  the  communicability  of  truth,  yet  the  essay  is  far  iirom  be 
ing  a  digression.  Having  given  utterance  to  quicquid  in  rem 
tarn  maleficam  indignatio  dolorque  dictarent,  concerning  the 
mischiefs  of  a  lawless  press,  I  held  -it  an  act  of  justice  to  give  a 
portrait  no  less  lively  of  the  excess  to  which  the  remorseless  am 
bition  of  a  government  might  go  in  accumulating  its  oppressions 
in  the  one  instance  before  the  discovery  of  printing,  and  in  the 
other  during  the  suppression  of  its  freedom. 

I  have  translated  the  following  from  a  voluminous  German 
work,  Michael  Ignaz  Schmidt's  History  of  the  Germans,  from 
CharltJs  the  Great  to  Conrade  I.  ;  in  which  this  extract  forms  the 
conclusion  of  the  second  chapter  of  the  third  book.  The  late 
tyrant's  close  imitation  of  Charlemagne  was  sufficiently  evidenced 
by  his  assumption  of  the  iron  crown  of  Italy,  by  his  imperial 
coronation  with  the  presence  and  authority  of  the  Holy  Father ; 
by  his  imperial  robe  embroidered  with  bees  in  order  to  mark  him 
as  a  successor  of  Pepin,  and  even  by  his  ostentatious  revocation 
of  Charlemagne's  grants  to  the  Bishop  of  Rome.  But  that  the 
differences  might  be  felt  likewise,  I  have  prefaced  the  translation 
with  the  few  following  observations. 

*  This  translation  has  expressions  referring  to  some  words  inserted  by 
the  author  in  the  Latin  quotation  in  the  previous  editions. — Ed. 


82  THE    FRIEND. 

Let  it  be  remembered  then,  that  Charlemagne,  for  the  greater 
part,  created  for  himself  the  means  of  which  he  availed  himself; 
that  his  very  education  was  his  own  work,  and  that  unlike  Peter 
the  Great,  he  could  find  no  assistants  out  of  his  own  realm ;  that 
the  unconquerable  courage  and  heroic  dispositions  of  the  nations 
he  conquered,  supplied  a  proof  positive  of  real  superiority,  indeed 
the  sole  positive  proof  of  intellectual  power,  in  a  warrior  :  for  how 
can  we  measure  force  but  by  the  resistance  to  it  ?  But  all  was 
prepared  for  Bonaparte  ;  Europe  weakened  in  the  very  heart  of 
all  human  strength,  namely,  in  moral  and  religious  principle,  and 
at  the  same  time  accidentally  destitute. of  any  one  great  or  com 
manding  mind  :  the  French  people,  on  the  other  hand,  still  rest 
less  from  revolutionary  fanaticism  ;  their  civic  enthusiasm  already 
passed  into  military  passion  and  the  ambition  of  conquest  ;  and 
alike  by  disgust,  terror,  and  characteristic  unfitness  for  freedom, 
ripe  for  the  reception  of  a  despotism.  Add  too,  that  the  main 
obstacles  to  an  unlimited  system  of  conquest,  and  the  pursuit  of 
universal  monarchy  had  been  cleared  away  for.  him  by  his 
pioneers  the  Jacobins,  namely,  the  influence  of  the  great  land 
holders,  of  the  privileged  and  of  the  commercial  classes.  Even 
the  naval  successes  of  Great  Britain,  by  destroying  the  trade, 
rendering  useless  the  colonies,  and  almost  annihilating  the  navy 
of  France,  were  in  some  respects  subservient  to  his  designs  by 
concentrating  the  powers  of  the  French  empire  in  its  armies,  and 
supplying  them  out  of  the  wrecks  of  all  other  employments,  save 
that  of  agriculture.  France  had  already  approximated  to  the 
formidable  state  so  prophetically  described  by  Sir  James  Steuart, 
in  his  Political  Economy,  in  which  the  population  should  consist 
chiefly  of  soldiers  and  peasantry  :  at  least  the  interests  of  no  other 
classes  were  regarded.  The  great  merit  of  Bonaparte  has  been 
that  of  a  skilful  steersman,  who  with  his  boat  in  the  most  violent 
storm  still  keeps  himself  on  the  summit  of  the  waves,  which  not 
he,  but  the  winds  had  raised.  I  will  now  proceed  to  my  transla 
tion. 

"  That  Charles  was  a  hero,  his  exploits  bear  evidence.  The 
subjugation  of  the  Lombards,  protected  as  they  were  by  the  Alps, 
by  fortresses  and  fortified  towns,  by  numerous  armies,  and  by  a 
great  name  ;  of  the  Saxons,  secured  by  their  savage  resoluteness, 
by  an  untamable  love  of  freedom,  by  their  desert  plains  and 
enormous  forests,  and  by  their  own  poverty  ;  the  humbling  of  the 


ESSAY    XII.  83 

Dukes  of  Bavaria,  Aquitania,  Bretagne,  and  Gascony  ;  proud  of 
their  ancestry  as  well  as  of  their  ample  domains  ;  the  almost  en 
tire  extirpation  of  the  Avars,  so  long  the  terror  of  Europe  ;  are 
assuredly  works  which  demanded  a  courage  and  a  firmness  of 
mind  such  as  Charles  only  possessed. 

"  How  great  his  reputation  was,  and  this  too  beyond  the  limits 
of  Europe,  is  proved  by  the  embassies  sent  to  him  out  of  Persia, 
Palestine,  Mauritania,  and  even  from  the  Khalifs  of  Bagdad. 
If  at  the  present  day  an  embassy  from  the  Black  or  Caspian  Sea 
comes  to  a  prince  on  the  Baltic,  it  is  not  to  be  wondered  at,  since 
such  are  now  the  political  relations  of  the  four  quarters  of  the 
world,  that  a  blow  which  is  given  to  anyone  of  them  is  felt  more 
or  less  by  all  the  others.  Whereas  in  the  time  of  Charlemagne, 
the  inhabitants  in  one  of  the  known  parts  of  the  world  scarcely 
knew  what  was  going  on  in  the  rest.  Nothing  but  the  extraor 
dinary,  all-piercing  report  of  Charles's  exploits  could  bring  this 
to  pass.  His  greatness,  which  set  the  world  in  astonishment, 
was  likewise,  without  doubt,  that  which  begot  in  the  Pope  and 
the  Romans  the  first  idea  of  the  re-establishment  of  their  empire. 

"  It  is  true,  that  a  number  of  things  united  to  make  Charles  a 
great  man — favorable  circumstances  of  time,  a  nation  already- 
disciplined  to  warlike  habits,  a  long  life,  and  the  consequent  ac 
quisition  of  experience,  such  as  no  one  possessed  in  his  whole 
realm.  Still,  however,  the  principal  means  of  his  greatness 
Charles  found  in  himself.  His  great  mind  was  capable  of  ex 
tending  its  attention  lo  the  greatest  multiplicity  of  affairs.  In  the 
middle  of  Saxony  he  thought  on  Italy  and  Spain,  and  at  Rome 
he  made  provisions  for  Saxony,  Bavaria,  and  Pannonia.  He 
gave  audience  to  the  ambassadors  of  the  Greek  emperor  and 
other  potentates,  and  himself  audited  the  accounts  of  his  own 
farms,  where  every  thing  was  entered  even  to  the  number  of  the 
eggs.  Busy  as  his  mind  was,  his  body  was  not  less  in  one  con 
tinued  state  of  motion.  Charles  would  see  into  every  thing  him 
self,  and  do  every  thing  himself,  as  far  as  his  powers  extended  ' 
and  even  this  it  was,  too,  which  gave  to  his  undertakings  such 
force  and  energy.  * 

"  But  with  all  this  the  government  of  Charles  was  the  govern 
ment  of  a  conqueror,  that  is  splendid  abroad  and  fearfully  oppres 
sive  at  home.  What  a  grievance  must  it  not  have  been  for  the 
people,  that  Charles  for  forty  years  together  dragged  them  now 


84  THE    FRIEND. 

to  the  Elbe,  then  to  the  Ebro,  after  this  to  the  Po,  and  from 
thence  back  again  to  the  Elbe,  and  this  not  to  check  an  invading 
enemy,  but  to  make  conquests  which  little  profited  the  French 
nation  !  This  must  prove  too  much,  at  length,  for  a  hired  sol 
dier  :  how  much  more  for  conscripts,  who  did  not  live  only  to 
fight,  but  who  were  fathers  of  families,  citizens,  and  proprietors  ? 
But  above  all,  it  is  to  be  wondered  at,  that  a  nation,  like  the 
French,  should  suffer  themselves  to  be  used  as  Charles  used  them. 
But  the  people  no  longer  possessed  any  considerable  share  of  in 
fluence.  All  depended  on  the  great  chieftains,  who  gave  their 
willing  suffrage  for  endless  wars,  by  which  they  were  always  sure 
to  win.  They  found  the  best  opportunity,  under  such  circum 
stances,  to  make  themselves  great  and  mighty  at  the  expense  of 
the  freemen  resident  within  the  circle  of  their  baronial  courts  ; 
and  when  conquests  were  made,  it  was  far  more  for  their  advan 
tage  than  that  of  the  monarchy.  In  the  conquered  provinces 
there  was  a  necessity  for  dukes,  vassal  kings,  and  different  high 
offices  :  all  this  fell  to  their  share. 

"  I  would  not  say  this  if  we  did  not  possess  incontrovertible 
original  documents  of  those  times,  which  prove  clearly  to  us  that 
Charles's  government  was  an  unhappy  one  for  the  people,  and 
that  this  great  man,  by  his  actions,  labored  to  the  direct  subver 
sion  of  his  first  principles.  It  was  his  first  pretext  to  establish  a 
greater  equality  among  the  members  of  his  vast  community,  and 
to  make  all  free  and  equal  subjects  under  a  common  sovereign. 
And,  from  the  necessity  occasioned  by  continual  war,  the  exact 
contrary  took  place.  Nothing  gives  us  a  better  notion  of  the  in 
terior  state  of  the  French  monarchy,  than  the  third  capitular  of 
the  year  811.*  All  is  full  of  complaint,  the  bishops  and  earls 
clamoring  against  the  freeholders,  and  these  in  their  turn  against 
the  bishops  and  earls.  And,  in  truth,  the  freeholders  had  no 
small  reason  to  be  discontented  and  to  resist,  as  far  as  they  dared, 
even  the  imperial  levies.  A  dependant  must  be  content  to  fol 
low  his  lord  without  further  questioning  :  for  he  was  paid  for  it. 
But  a  free  citizen,  who  lived  wholly  on  his  own  property,  might 
reasonably  object  to  suffer  himself  to  be  dragged  about  in  all 
quarters  of  the  world,  at  the  fancies  of  his  lord  :  especially  as 
there  was  so  much  injustice  intermixed.  Those  who  gave  up 

*  Compare  with  this  the  four  or  five  quarto  volumes  o'f  the  French  Con 
script  Code. 


ESSAY    XII.  85 

their  properties  entirely,  or  in  part,  of  their  own  accord,  were  left 
undisturbed  at  home,  while  those,  who  refused  to  do  this,  were 
forced  so  often  into  service,  that  at  length,  becoming  impover 
ished,  they  were  compelled  by  want  to  give  up,  or  dispose  of, 
their  free  tenures  to  the  bishops  or  earls.* 

"  It  almost  surpasses  belief  to  what  a  height,  at  length,  the 
aversion  to  war  rose  in  the  French  nation,  from  the  multitude 
of  the  campaigns,  and  the  grievances  connected  with  them.  The 
national  vanity  was  now  satiated  by  the  frequency  of  victories : 
and  the  plunder  which  fell  to  the  lot  of  individuals,  made  but  a 
poor  compensation  ibr  the  losses  and  burthens  sustained  by  their 
families,  at  home.  Some,  in  order  to  become  exempt  from  mili 
tary  service,  sought  for  menial  employments  in  the  establish 
ments  of  the  bishops,  abbots,  abbesses,  and  earls.  4  Others  made 
over  their  free  property  to  become  tenants  at  will  of  such  lords, 
as  from  their  age  or  other  circumstances,  they  thought  would  be 
called  to  no  further  military  services.  Others  even  privately  took 
away  the  life  of  their  mothers,  aunts,  or  other  of  their  relatives, 
in  order  that  no  family  residents  might  remain  through  whom 
their  names  might  be  known,  and  themselves  traced  ;  others 
voluntarily  made  slaves  of  themselves,  in  order  thus  to  render 
themselves  incapable  of  the  military  rank." 

When  this  extract  was  first  published,  namely,  September  7, 
1809,  I  prefixed  the  following  sentence  :  "  This  passage  contains 
so  much  matter  for  political  anticipation  and  well-grounded  hope, 
that  I  feel  no  apprehension  of  the  reader's  being  dissatisfied  with 
its  length."  I  trust,  that  I  may  now  derive  the  same  confidence 
from  his  genial  exultation,  as  a  Christian,  and  from  his  honest 
pride  as  a  Briton,  in  the  retrospect  of  its  completion.  In  this  be 
lief  I  venture  to  conclude  the  essay  with  the  following  extract 
from  a  "  Comparison  of  the  French  republic,  under  Bonaparte, 
with  the  Roman  empire  under  the  first  Ciesars,"  published  by  me 
in  the  Morning  Post,  21st  September,  1802. 

If,  then,  there  be  no  counterpoise  of  dissimilar  circumstances, 
the  prospect  is  gloomy  indeed.  The  commencement  of  the  pub 
lic  slavery  in  Rome,  was  in  the  most  splendid  eja  of  human 
genius.  Any  unusually  flourishing  period  of  the  arts  and  sci- 

*  It  would  require  no  great  ingenuity  to  discover  parallels,  or  at  least 
equivalent*  hardships  to  these,  in  the  treatment  of,  and  regulations  concern 
ing,  the  reluctant  conscripts. 


86  THE    FRIEND. 

ences  in  any  country,  is,  even  to  this  day,  called  the  Augustan 
age  of  that  country.  The  Roman  poets,  the  Roman  historians, 
the  Roman  orators,  rivalled  those  of  Greece  ;  in  military  tactics, 
in  machinery,  in  all  the  conveniences  of  private  life,  the  Romans 
greatly  surpassed  the  Greeks.  With  few  exceptions,  all  the  em 
perors,  even  the  worst  of  them,  were,  like  Bonaparte,*  the  liberal 
encouragers  of  all  great  public  works,  and  of  every  species  of 
public  merit  not  connected  with  the  assertion  of  political  freedom  : 

O  juvcnes,  circumspidt  atque  agitat  vos, 

Materiamque  sibi  Duds  indnlgentia  quarit.\ 

It  is  even  so,  at  this  present  moment,  in  France.  Yet,  both  in 
France  and  in  Rome,  we  have  learned,  that  the  most  abject  dis 
positions  to  slavery  rapidly  trod  on  the  heels  of  the  most  outra 
geous  fanaticism  for  an  almost  anarchical  liberty.  Ruere  in  ser- 
vitium  consules,  patres,  eques  :  quanta  quis  illustrior,  tanto 
magis  falsi  ac  festimmtes.^.  Peace  and  the  coadunation  of  all 
the  civilized  provinces  of  the  earth  were  the  grand  and  plausible 
pretexts  of  Roman  despotism  :  the  degeneracy  of  the  human 
species  itself,  in  all  the  nations  so  blended,  was  the  melancholy 
effect.  To-morrow,  therefore,  we  shall  endeavor  to  detect  all 
those  points  and  circumstances  of  dissimilarity,  which,  though 

*  Imitators  succeed  better  in  copying  the  vices  than  the  excellences  of 
their  archetypes.  Where  shall  we  find  in  the  First  Consul  of  France  a 
counterpart  to  the  generous  and  dreadless  clemency  of  the  first  Caesar  ? 
Acerbe  loqucntibus  satin  kabuit  pro  condone  dcnundare,  tie  persevcrarent. 
Antique  CfEdnce  criminosissimo  libro,  et  l^itholai  carminibus  maledicentis- 
simis  laceratam  ezistimationem  suam  dvili  animo  tulit. — (Sueton.  I.  75. — 
Ed.) 

It  deserves  translation  for  English  readers.  "  To  those  who  spoke  bit 
terly  against  him,  he  held  it  sufficient  to  signify  publicly,  that  they  should 
not  persevere  in  the  use  of  such  language.  His  character  had  been  mangled 
in  a  most  libellous  work  of  Aulus  Caecina,  and  he  had  been  grossly  lam 
pooned  in  some  verses  by  Pitholaus  ;  but  he  bore  both  with  the  temper  of 
a  good  citizen." 

For  this  part  of  the  First  Consul's  character,  if  common  report  speaks 
the  truth,  we  must  seek  a  parallel  in  the  dispositions  of  the  third  Caesar, 
who  dreaded  the  pen  of  a  paragraph  writer,  hinting  aught  against  his 
morals  and  measures,  with  as  great  anxiety,  and  with  as  vindictive  feelings, 
as  if  it  had  been  the  dagger  of  an  assassin  lifted  up  against  his  life.  From  the 
third  Caesar,  too,  he  adopted  the  abrogation  of  all  popular  elections. 

f  Juvenal  Sat.  vii.  20.— Ed. 
Tacit.  Ana.  i.  7.— Ed. 


ESSAY    XII.  87 

they  can  not  impeach  the  rectitude  of  the  parallel,  for  the  pres 
ent,  may  yet  render  it  probable,  that  as  the  same  constitution  of 
government  has  been  built  up  in  France  with  incomparably 
greater  rapidity,  so  it  may  have  an  incomparably  shorter  dura 
tion.  We  are  riot  conscious  of  any  feelings  of  bitterness  towards 
the  First  Consul  ;  or,  if  any,  only  that  venial  prejudice,  which 
naturally  results  from  the  having  hoped  proudly  of  an  individual, 
and  the  having  been  miserably  disappointed.  But  we  will  not 
voluntarily  cease  to  think  freely  and  speak  openly.  "We  owe 
grateful  hearts,  and  uplifted  hands  of  thanksgiving  to  the  Di 
vine  Providence,  that  there  is  yet  one  European  country — and 
that  country  our  own — in  which  the  actions  of  public  men  may 
be  boldly  analyzed,  and  the  result  publicly  stated.  And  let  the 
Chief  Consul,  who  professes  in  all  things  to  follow  his  fate,  learn 
to  submit  to  it,  if  he  finds  that  it  is  still  his  fate  to  struggle  with 
the  spirit  of  English  freedom,  and  the  virtues  which  are  the  off 
spring  of  that  spirit  ; — if  he  finds,  that  the  genius  of  Great  Brit 
ain,  which  blew  up  his  Egyptian  navy  into  the  air,  and  blighted 
his  Syrian  laurels,  still  follows  him  with  a  calm  and  dreadful 
eye  ;  arid  in  peace,  equally  as  in  war,  still  watches  for  that  lib 
erty,  in  which  alone  the  genius  of  our  isle  lives,  and  moves,  and 
has  its  being  ;  and  which  being  lost,  all  our  commercial  and 
naval  greatness  would  instantly  languish,  like  a  flower,  the  root 
of  which  had  been  silently  eaten  away  by  a  worm  ;  and  without 
which,  in  any  country,  the  public  festivals,  and  pompous  merri 
ments  of  a  nation  present  no  other  spectacle  to  the  eye  of  reason, 
than  a  mob  of  maniacs  dancing  in  their  fetters. 


ESSAY    XIII. 


Must  there  be  still  some  discord  mix'd  among 
The  harmony  of  men,  whose  mood  accords 
Best  with  contention  tun'd  to  notes  of  wrong  ? 
That  when  war  fails,  peace  must  make  war  with  words, 
With  words  unto  destruction  arm'd  more  strong 
Than  ever  were  our  foreign  foernens  awards; 
Making  as  deep,  tho'  not  yet  bleeding  wounds  ? 
What  war  left  scarless,  calumny  confounds. 

Truth  lies  cntrapp'd  where  cunning  finds  no  bar  : 
Since  no  proportion  can  there  be  betwixt 
'Our  actions  which  in  endless  motions  are, 
And  ordinances  which  are  always  fixt. 
Ten  thousand  laws  more  can  not  reach  so  far, 
But  malice  goes  beyond,  or  lives  commixt 
So  close  with  goodness,  that  it  ever  will 
Corrupt,  disguise,  or  counterfeit  it  still. 

And  therefore  would  our  glorious  Alfred,  who 
Join  d  with  the  king's  the  good  man's  majesty, 
Not  leave  law's  labyrinth  without  a  clue — 
Gave  to  deep  skill  its  juxt  authority, — 

****** 

JBitt  the  last  judgment — this  his  jury's  plan — 
Left  to  the  natural  sense  of  work-din/  man* 

I  RECUR  to  the  dilemma  stated  in  the  eighth  essay.  How 
shall  we  solve  this  problem  ?  Its  solution  is  to  be  found  in  that 
spirit  which,  like  the  universal  menstruum  sought  for  by  the  old 
alchemists,  can  blend  and  harmonize  the  most  discordant  ele 
ments  ; — it  is  to  be  found  in  the  spirit  of  a  rational  freedom  dif 
fused  and  become  national,  in  the  consequent  influence  and  con 
trol  of  public  opinion,  and  in  its  most  precious  organ,  the  jury.  It 

*  Daniel.  Epistle  to  Sir  Thomas  Egertoii.  The  lines  in  italics  are  sub 
stituted  by  the  author  for  the  original,  and  there  are  a  few  other  verbal 
alterations. — Ed. 


ESSAY    XIII.  89 

is  to  be  found,  wherever  juries  are  sufficiently  enlightened  to  per 
ceive  the  difference,  and  to  comprehend  the  origin  and  necessity 
of  the  .difference,  between  libels  and  other  criminal  overt-acts, 
and  are  sufficiently  independent  to  act  upon  the  conviction,  that 
in  a  charge  of  libel,  the  degree,  the  circumstances,  and  the  inten 
tion,  constitute — not  merely  modify — the  offence,  give  it  its  being, 
and  determine  its  legal  name.  The  words  maliciously  and  ad 
visedly,  must  here  have  a  force  of  their  own,  and  a  proof  of  their 
own.  They  will  consequently  consider  the  law  as  a  blank  power 
provided  for  the  punishment  of  the  offender,  not  as  a  light  by 
which  they  are  to  determine  and  discriminate  the  offence.  The 
understanding  and  conscience  of  the  jury  are  the  judges  in  toto  : 
the  law  a  blank  conge  d?  dire.  The  law  is  the  clay,  and  those 
the  potter's  wheel.  Shame  fall  on  that  man,  who  shall  labor  to 
confound  what  reason  and  nature  have  put  asunder,  and  who  at 
once,  as  far  as  in  him  lies,  would  render  the  press  ineffectual  and 
the  law  odious  :  who  would  lock  up  the  main  river,  the  Thames, 
of  our  intellectual  commerce  ;  would  throw  a  bar  across  the 
stream,  that  must  render  its  navigation  dangerous  or  partial, 
using  as  his  materials  the  very  banks,  which  were  intended  to 
deepen  its  channel  and  guard  against  its  inundations.!  Shame 
fall  on  him,  and  a  participation  of  the  infamy  of  those,  who  mis 
led  an  English  jury  to  the  murder  of  Algernon  Sidney. 

But  though  the  virtuous  intention  of  the  writer  must  be  allowed 
a  certain  influence  in  facilitating  his  acquittal,  the  degree  of  his 
moral  guilt  is  not  the  true  index  or  mete-wand  of  his  condemna 
tion.  For  juries  do  not  sit  in  a  court  of  conscience,  but  of  law ; 
they  are  not  the  representatives  of  religion,  but  the  guardians  of 
external  tranquillity.  The  leading  principle,  the  pole-star,  of  the 
judgment  in  its  decision  concerning  the  libellous  nature  of  a  pub 
lished  writing,  is  its  more  or  less  remote  connection  with  after 
overt-acts,  as  the  cause  or  occasion  of  the  same.  Thus  the  pub 
lication  of  actual  facts  may  be,  and  most  often  will  be,  criminal 
and  libellous,  when  directed  against  private  characters  :  riot  only 
because  the  charge  will  reach  the  minds  of  many  who  can  not  be 
competent  judges  of  the  truth  or  falsehood  of  facts  to  which  them 
selves  were  not  witnesses,  against  a  man  whom  they  do  not  know, 
or  at  best  know  imperfectly  ;  but  because  such  a  publication  is 
of  itself  a  very  serious  overt-act,  by  which  the  author  without  au 
thority  and  without  trial,  has  inflicted  punishment  on  a  fellow- 


90  THE    FRIEND. 

subject,  himself  being  witness  and  jury,  judge  and  executioner. 
Of  such  publications  there  can   be  no  legal  justification,  though 
the  wrong  may  be  palliated  by  the  circumstance  that  the  inju 
rious  charges  are  not  only  true,  but  wholly  out  of  the  reach  of 
the  law.     But  in  libels  on  the  government  there  are  two  things 
to  be  balanced  against  each  other  :  first,  the  incomparably  greater 
mischief  of  the  overt-acts,  if  we  suppose  them  actually  occasioned 
by  the  libel — (as  for  instance,  the  subversion  of  government  and 
property,   if  the  principles  taught  by  Thomas  Paine  had  been 
realized,  or  if  even  an  attempt   had   been  made  to  realize  them, 
by  the  many  thousands  of  his  readers)  ;  and  second,  the  very  great 
improbability  that  such  eflects  will  be  produced  by  such  writings. 
Governrnent   concerns   all  generally,  and  no  one  in   particular. 
The  facts  are  commonly  as  well  known  to  the  readers,  as  to  the 
writer  :  and  falsehood  therefore   easily  detected.     It   is  proved, 
likewise,  by  experience,  that  the  frequency  of  open  political  dis 
cussion,  with  all  its  blamable  indiscretions,  indisposes  a  nation 
to  overt-acts  of  practical  sedition  or  conspiracy.      They  talk  ill, 
said  Charles  V.  of  his  Belgian,  provinces,  but  they  suffer  so  much 
the  better  for  it.     His  successor  thought  differently  :  he  deter 
mined  to .  be  master  of  their  words  and  opinions,  as  well  as  of 
their  actions,  arid  in  consequence  lost  one  half  of  those  provinces, 
and  retained  the  other  half  at  an  expense  of  strength  and  treas 
ure  greater  than  the  original  worth  of  the  whole.     An  enlight 
ened  jury,  therefore,  will  require  proofs  of  more  than  ordinary 
malignity  of  intention,  as  furnished  by  the  style,  price,  mode  of 
circulation,   and   so  forth  ;  or  of  punishable  indiscretion  arising 
out  of  the  state  of  the  times,  as  of  dearth,  for  instance,  or  of  what 
ever  other  calamity  is  likely  to  render  the  lower  classes  turbulent, 
and  apt  to  be  alienated  from  the  government  of  their  country. 
For  the  absence  of  a  right  disposition  of  mind  must  be  considered 
both  in  law  and  in  morals,  as  nearly  equivalent  to  the  presence 
of  a  wrong  disposition.      Under  such  circumstances  the  legal 
paradox  that  a  libel  may  be  the  more  a  libel  for  being  true,  be 
comes  strictly  just,  and  as  such  ought  to  be  acted  upon. 

Concerning  the  right  of  punishing  by  law  the  authors  of  heret 
ical  or  deistical  writings,  I  reserve  my  remarks  for  a  future  essay, 
in  which  I  hope  to  state  the  grounds  and  limits  of  toleration  more 
accurately  than  they  seem  to  me  to  have  been  hitherto  traced. 
There  is  one  maxim,  however,  which  I  am  tempted  to  seize  as  it 


ESSAY    XIII.  91 

passes  across  me.  If  I  may  trust  my  own  memory,  it  is  indeed  a 
very  old  truth  :  and  yet  if  the  fashion  of  acting  in  apparent  igno 
rance  thereof  be  any  presumption  of  its  novelty,  it  ought  to  be 
new,  or  at  least  have  become  so  by  courtesy  of  oblivion.  It  is 
this  :  that  as  far  as  human  practice  can 'realize  the  sharp  limits 
and  exclusive  proprieties  of  science,  law  arid  religion  should  be 
kept  distinct.  There  is,  in  strictness,  no  proper  opposition  but 
between  the  two  polar  forces  of  one  and  the  same  power.*  If  I 
say  then,  that  law  and  religion  are  natural  opposites,  and  that  the 
latter  is  the  requisite  counterpoise  of  the  former,  let  it  not  be 
interpreted,  as  if  I  had  declared  them  to  be  contraries.  The  law 
has  rightfully  invested  the  creditor  with  the  power  of  arresting 
and  imprisoning  an  insolvent  debtor,  the  farmer  with  the  power 
of  transporting,  mediately  at  least,  the  pillagers  of  his  hedges 
and  copses  ;  but  the  law  does  not  compel  him  to  exercise  that 
power,  while  it  will  often  happen  that  religion  commands  him 
to  forego,  it.  Nay,  so  well  was  this  understood  by  our  grand 
fathers,  that  a  man  who  squares  his  conscience  by  the  law  was  a 
common  paraphrase  or  synonyme  of  a  wretch  without  any  con 
science  at  all.  We  have  all  of  us  learnt  from  history,  that  there 
was  a  long  and  dark  period,  during  which  the  powers  and  the 
aims  of  law  were  usurped  in  the  name  of  religion  by  the  clergy 
and  the  courts  spiritual  :  and  we  all  know  the  result.  Law  and 

*  Every  power  iu  nature  and  in  spirit  must  evolve  an  opposite  as  the 
sole  means  and  condition  of  its  manifestation:  and  all  opposition  is  a  ten 
dency  to  re-union.  This  is  the  universal  law  of  polarity  or  essential  dual 
ism,  first  promulgated  by  Heraclitus,  2000  years  afterwards  re-published, 
and  made  the  foundation  both  of  logic,  of  physics,  and  of  metaphysics  by 
Giordano  Bruno.  The  principle  may  be  thus  expressed.  The  identity  of 
thesis  and  antithesis  is  the  substance  of  all  being;  their  opposition  the  con 
dition  of  all  existence  or  being  manifested;  and  every  thing  or  phenomenon 
is  the  exponent  of  a  synthesis  as  long  as  the  opposite  energies  are  retained 
in  that  synthesis.  Thus  water  is  neither  oxygen  nor  hydrogen,  nor  yet  is-  it 
a  commixture  of  both ;  but  the  synthesis  or  indifference  of  the  two :  and  as 
long  as  the  copula  endures,  by  which  it  becomes  water,  or  rather  which 
alone  is  water,  it  is  not  less  a  simple  body  than  either  of  the  imaginary  ele 
ments,  improperly  called  its  ingredients  or  components.  It  is  the  object  of 
the  mechanical  atomistic  philosophy  to  confound  synthesis  with  Kynartcxis, 
or  rather  with  mere  juxtaposition  of  eorpuscules  separated  by  invisible  in 
terspaces.  I  find  it  difficult  to  determine,  whether  this  theory  contrail icts 
the  reason  or  the  senses  most :  for  it  is  alike  inconceivable  and  unimagi 
nable. 


92  THE    FKIEND. 

religion  thus  interpenetrating1,  neutralized  each  other ;  and  the 
baleful  product,  or  tertium  aliquid,  of  this  union  retarded  the 
civilization  of  Europe  for  centuries.  Law  splintered  into  the 
minuticB  of  religion,  the  awful  function  and  prerogative  of  which 
it  is  to  take  account  of  every  idle  ivord,  became  a  busy  and  in 
quisitorial  tyranny  :  and  religion  substituting  legal  terrors  for  the 
ennobling  influences  of  conscience  remained  religion  in  name  only. 
The  present  age  appears  to  me  approaching  fast  to  a  similar 
usurpation  of  the  functions  of  religion  by  law  :  and  if  it  were  re 
quired,  I  should  not  want  strong  presumptive  proofs  in  favor  of 
this  opinion,  whether  I  sought  for  them  in  the  charges  from  the 
bench  concerning  wrongs,  to  which  religion  denounces  the  fearful 
penalties  of  guilt,  but  for  which  the  law  of  the  land  assigns 
damages  only  :  or  in  sundry  statutes — and  all  praise  to  the  late 
Mr.  Wyndham,  Romanontm  ultimo — in  a  still  greater  number 
of  attempts  towards  new  statutes,  the  authors  of  which  displayed 
the  most  pitiable  ignorance,  not  merely  of  the  distinction  between 
perfect,  and  imperfect  obligations,  but  even  of  that  still  more 
sacred  distinction  between  things  arid  persons.  What  the  son 
of  Sirach  advises  concerning  the  soul,  every  senator  should  apply 
to  his  legislative  capacity  : — reverence  it  in  meekness,  knowing 
how  feeble  and  how  mighty  a  thing  it  is  !* 

From  this  hint  concerning  toleration,  we* may  pass  by  an 
easy  transition  to  the,  perhaps,  still  more  interesting  subject  of 
tolerance.  And  here  I  fully  coincide  with  Frederic  H.  Jacobi, 
that  the  only  true  spirit  of  tolerance  consists  in  our  conscientious 
toleration  of  each  other's  intolerance.  Whatever  pretends  to  be 
more  than  this,  is  either  the  unthinking  cant  of  fashion,  or  the 
soul-palsying  narcotic  of  moral  and  religious  indifference.  All  of 
us  without  exception,  in  the  same  mode  though  not  in  the  same 
degree,  are  necessarily  subjected  to  the  risk  of  mistaking  posi 
tive  opinions  for  certainty  and  clear  insight.  From  this  yoke  we 
can  not  free  ourselves,  but  by  ceasing  to  be  men  ;  and  this  too 
not  in  order  to  transcend,  but  to  sink  below,  our  human  nature. 
For  if  in  one  point  of  view  it  be  the  -mulct  of  our  fall,  and  of 
the  corruption  of  our  will ;  it  is  equally  true,  that  contemplated 
from  another  point,  it  is  the  price  and  consequence  of  our  pro- 
gressiveness.  To  him  who  is  compelled  to  pace  to  and  fro  within 

*  The  reference,  probably,  is  to  Ecclus.  x.  28.  My  son,  glorify  thy  soul  in 
meekness,  and  give  it  honor  according  to  the  dignity  thereof. — JKd. 


ESSAY    XIII.  93 

the  high  walls  and  in  the  narrow  court-yard  of  a  prison,  all  ob 
jects  may  appear  clear  and  distinct.  It  is  the  traveller  journey 
ing  onward  full  of  heart  and  hope,  with,  an  ever-varying  horizon 
on  the  boundless  plain,  who  is  liable  to  mistake  clouds  for  moun 
tains,  and  the  mirage  of  drouth  for  an  expanse  of  refreshing 
waters. 

But  notwithstanding  this  deep  conviction  of  our  general  falli 
bility,  and  the  most  vivid  recollection  of  my  own,  I  dare  avow 
with  the  German  philosopher,  that  as  far  as  opinions,  and  not 
motives,  principles,  and  not  men, — are  concerned  ;  I  neither  am 
tolerant,  nor  wish  to  be  regarded  as  such.  According  to  my 
judgment,  it  is  mere  ostentation,  or  a  poor  trick  that  hypocrisy 
plays  with  the  cards  of  nonsense,  when  a  man  makes  protestation 
of  being  perfectly  tolerant  in  respect  of  all  principles,  opinions, 
and  persuasions,  those  alone  excepted  which  render  the  holders 
intolerant.  For  he  either  means  to  say  by  this,  that  he  is 
utterly  indifferent  towards  all  truth,  and  finds  nothing  so  insuffer 
able  as  the  persuasion  of  there  being  any  such  mighty  value  or 
importance  attached  to  the  possession  of  the  truth  as  should  give 
a  marked  preference  to  any  one  conviction  above  any  other  ;  or 
else  he  means  nothing,  and  amuses  himself  with  articulating  the 
pulses  of  the  air  instead  of  inhaling  it  in  the  more  healthful  and 
profitable  exercise  of  yawning.  That  which  doth  not  withstand, 
hath  itself  no  standing  place.  To  fill  a  station  is  to  exclude  or 
repel  others, — and  this  is  not  less  the  definition  of  moral,  than  of 
material  solidity.  We  live  by  continued  acts  of  defence,  that  in 
volve  a  sort  of  offensive  warfare.  But  a  man's  principles,  on 
which  he  grounds  his  hope  and  his  faith,  are  the  life  of  his  life. 
We  live  by  faith,  says  the  philosophic  Apostle  ;  and  faith  with 
out  principles  is  but  a  flattering  phrase  for  wilful  positiveness,  or 
fanatical  bodily  sensation.  Well,  and  of  good  right  therefore,  do 
we  maintain  with  more  zeal,  than  we  should  defend  body  or  es 
tate,  a  deep  and  inward  conviction,  which  is  as  the  moon  to  us  ; 
and  like  the  rnoon  with  all  its  massy  shadows  and  deceptive 
gleams,  it  yet  lights  us  on  our  way,  poor  travellers  as  we  are,  and 
benighted  pilgrims.  With  all  its  spots  and  changes  and  tempo 
rary  eclipses,  with  all  its  vain  halos  and  bedimming  vapors,  it 
yet  reflects  the  light  that  is  to  rise  on  us,  which  even  now  is 
rising,  though  intercepted  from  our  immediate  view  by  the  moun 
tains  that  inclose  and  frown  over  the  vale  of  our  mortal  life. 


9-i  THE    FRIEND. 

This  again  is  the  mystery  and  the  dignity  of  our  human  na 
ture,  that  we  can  riot  give  up  our  reason,  without  giving  up  at 
the  same  time  our  individual  personality.  For  that  must  appear 
to  each  man  to  be  his  reason  which  produces  in  him  the  highest 
sense  of  certainty  ;  and  yet  it  is  riot  reason,  except  so  far  as  it  is 
of  universal  validity  and  obligatory  on  all  mankind.  There  is  a 
one  heart  for  the  whole  mighty  mass  of  humanity,  and  every 
pulse  in  each  particular  vessel  strives  to  beat  in  concert  with  it. 
He  who  asserts  that  truth  is  of  no  importance  except  in  the 
signification  of  sincerity,  confounds  sense  with  madness,  and  the 
word  of  God  with  a  dream.  If  the  power  of  reasoning  be  the 
gift  of  the  supreme  Reason,  that  we  be  sedulous,  yea,  and  mili 
tant  in  the  endeavor  to  reason  aright,  is  his  implied  command. 
But  what  is  of  permanent  and  essential  interest  to  one  man  must 
needs  be  so  to  all,  in  proportion  to  the  means  and  opportunities 
of  each.  Woe  to  him  by  whom  these  are  neglected,  and  double 
woe  to  him  by  whom  they  are  withholden  ;  for  he  robs  at  once 
himself  and  his  neighbor.  That  man's  soul  is  not  dear  to  him 
self,  to  whom  the  souls  of  his  brethren  are  not  dear.  As  far  as 
they  can  be  influenced  by  him,  they  are  parts  and  properties  of 
his  own  soul,  their  faith  his  faith,  their  errors  his  burthen,  their 
righteousness  and  bliss  his  righteousness  and  his  reward — arid  of 
their  guilt  and  misery  his  own  will  be  the  echo.  As  much  as  I 
love  my  fellow-men,  so  much  and  no  more  will  I  be  intolerant  of 
their  heresies  and  unbelief — and  I  will  honor  and  hold  forth  the 
right  hand  of  fellowship  to  every  individual  who  is  equally  in 
tolerant  of  that  which  he  conceives  such  in  me.  We  will  both 
exclaim — '  I  know  not  what  antidotes  among  the  complex  views, 
impulses  and  circumstances,  that  form  your  moral  being,  God's 
gracious  providence  may  have  vouchsafed  to  you  against  the  ser 
pent  fang  of  this  error, — but  it  is  a  viper,  and  its  poison  deadly, 
although  through  higher  influences  some  men  may  take  the  rep 
tile  to  their  bosom,  and  remain  unstung.' 

In  one  of  those  poisonous  journals,  which  deal  out  profaneness, 
hate,  fury,  and  sedition  through  the  land,  I  read  the  following 
paragraph.  "  The  Brahmin  believes  that  every  man  will  be 
saved  in  his  own  persuasion,  and  that  all  religions  are  equally 
pleasing  to  the  God  of  all.  The  Christian  confines  salvation  to 
the  believer  in  his  own  Vedas  and  Shasters.  Which  is  the  moro 
humane  and  philosophic  creed  of  the  two  ?"  Let  question  an- 


ESSAY    XIII.  95 

swer  question.  Self-complacent  scoffer  !  "Whom  meanest  thou 
by  God  ?  The  God  of  truth  ? — and  can  He  be  pleased  with 
falsehood,  and  the  debasement  or  utter  suspension  of  the  reason 
which  he  gave  to  man  that  he  might  receive  from  him  the  sacri 
fice  of  truth  ?  Or  the  God  of  love  and  mercy  ? — and  can  He  be 
pleased  with  the  blood  of  thousands  poured  out  under  the  wheels 
of  Juggernaut,  or  with  the  shrieks  of  children  offered  up  as  fire 
offerings  to  Baal  or  to  Moloch  ?  Or  dost  thou  mean  the  God  of 
holiness  and  infinite  purity? — and  can  He  be  pleased  with 
abominations  unutterable  and  more  than  brutal  defilements, — 
and  equally  pleased  too  as  with  that  religion,  which  commands 
us  that  we  have  no  fellowship  with  the  unfruitful  works  of  dark 
ness  but  to  reprove  them  ; — with  that  religion,  which  strikes  the 
fear  of  the  Most  High  so  deeply,  arid  the  sense  of  the  exceeding 
sin  fulness  of  sin  so  inwardly,  that  the  believer  anxiously  inquires  : 
Sliall  I  give  my  first-born  for  my  transgression,  the  fruit  of  my 
body  for  the  sin  of  my  soul  ? — and  which  makes  answer  to  him, — 
He  hath  sJwiced  thee,  O  man,  ivhat  is  good  ;  and  ivhat  doth  the 
Lord  require  of  thce,  but  to  do  justly,  and  to  love  mercy,  and  to 
U'alk  humbly  with  thy  God  ?*  But  I  check  myself.  It  is  at 
once  folly  arid  profanation  of  truth,  to  reason  with  the  man  who 
can  place  before  his  eyes  a  minister  of  the  Gospel  directing  the 
eye  of  the  widow  from  the  corpse  of  her  husband  upward  to  his 
and  her  Redeemer, — (the  God  of  the  living  and  not  of  the 
dead) — and  then  the  remorseless  Brahmin  goading  on  the  discon 
solate  victim  to  the  flames  of  her  husband's  funeral  pile,  aban 
doned  by,  and  abandoning,  the  helpless  pledges  of  their  love — 
and  yet  dare  ask,  which  is  the  more  humane  and  philosophic 
creed  of  the  two  ? — No  !  No  !  when  such  opinions  are  in  ques 
tion  I  neither  am,  nor  will  be,  nor  wish  to  be  regarded  as,  tolerant. 

*  Micali  vl  7,  8.— J2£ 


ESSAY  XIV. 

Knowing  the  heart  of  man  is  set  to  be 

The  centre  of  this  world,  about  the  which 

These  re\rolutions  of  disturbances 

Still  roll ;  where  all  the  Aspects  of  misery 

Predominate  ;  whose  strong  effects  are  such, 

As  he  must  bear,  being  powerless  to  redress : 

And  that  unless  above  himself  he  can 

Erect  himself,  how  poor  a  thing  is  man  !  DANIEL.* 

I  HAVE  thus  endeavored,  with  an  anxiety  which  may  perhaps 
have  misled  me  into  prolixity,  to  detail  and  ground  the  conditions 
under  which  the  communication  of  truth  is  commanded  or  for 
bidden  to  us  as  individuals,  by  our  conscience  ;  and  those  too, 
under  which  it  is  permissible  by  the  law  which  controls  our  con 
duct  as  members  of  the  state.  But  is  the  subject  of  sufficient 
importance  to  deserve  so  minute  an  examination  ?  0  that  my 
readers  would  look  round  the  world,  as  it  now  is,  and  make  to 
themselves  a  faithful  catalogue  of  its  many  miseries  !  From  what 
do  these  proceed,  and  on  what  do  they  depend  for  their  continu 
ance  ?  Assuredly,  for  the  greater  part,  on  the  actions  of  men, 
and  those  again  on  the  want  of  a  vital  principle  of  action.  We 
live  by  faith.  The  essence  of  virtue  consists  in  the  principle. 
And  the  reality  of  this,  as  well  as  its  importance,  is  believed  by 
all  men  in  fact,  few  as  there  may  be  who  bring  the  truth  for 
ward  into  the  light  of  distinct  consciousness.  Yet  all  men  feel, 
and  at  times  acknowledge  to  themselves,  the  true  cause  of  their 
misery.  There  is  no  man  so  base,  but  that  at  some  time  or  other, 
and  in  some  way  or  other,  he  admits  that  he  is  not  what  he 
ought  to  be,  though  by  a  curious  art  of  self-delusion,  by  an  effort 
to  keep  at  peace  with  himself  as  long  and  as  much  as  possible, 
he  will  throw  off  the  blame  from  the  amenable  part  of  his  na- 

*  Epistle  to  the  Countess  of  Cumberland. — Ed. 


ESSAY    XIV.  97 

ture,  his  moral  principle,  to  that  which  is  independent  of  his  will, 
namely,  the  degree  of  his  intellectual  faculties.  Hence,  for  once 
that  a  man  exclaims,  how  dishonest  I  am  !  on  what  base  and 
unworthy  motives  I  act !  we  may  hear  a  hundred  times,  what  a 
fool  I  am  !  curse  on  my  folly  !  and  the  likc.^ 

•  Yet  even  this  implies  an  obscure  sentiment,  that  with  clearer 
conceptions  in  the  understanding,  the  principle  of  action  would 
become  purer  in  the  will.  Thanks  to  the  image  of  our  Maker 
not  wholly  obliterated  from  any  human  soul,  we  dare  not  pur 
chase  an  exemption  from  guilt  by  an  excuse,  which  would  place 
our  melioration  out  of  our  own  power.  Thus  the  very  man,  who 
will  abuse  himself  for  a  fool  but  not  for  a  villain,  would  rather, 
spite  of  the  usual  professions  to  the  contrary,  be  condemned  as  a 
rogue  by  other  men,  than  be  acquitted  as  a  blockhead.  But  be 
this  as  it  may,  in  and  out  of  himself,  however,  he  sees  plainly  the 
true  cause  of  our  common  complaints.  Doubtless,  there  seem 
many  physical  causes  of  distress,  of  disease,  of  poverty  and  'of 
desolation — tempests,  earthquakes,  volcanos,  wild  or  venomous 
animals,  barren  soils,  uncertain  or  tyrannous  climates,  pestilen 
tial  swamps,  and  death  in  the  very  air  we  breathe.  Yet  when 
do  we  hear  the  general  wretchedness  of  mankind  attributed  to 
these  ?  Even  in  the  most  awful  of  the  Icelandic  and  Sicilian 
eruptions,  when  the  earth  has  opened  and  sent  forth  vast  rivers 
of  /ire,  and  the  smoke  and  vapor  have  dimmed  the  light  of  heaven 
for  months,  how  small  has  been  the  comparative  injury  to  the  hu 
man  race  ; — and  how  much  even  of  this  injury  might  be  fairly 
attributed  to  combined  imprudence  and  superstition  !  Natural 
calamities  that  do  indeed  spread  devastation  wide  (for  instance, 
the  marsh  fever),  are  almost  without  exception,  voices  of  nature 
in  her  all-intelligible  language — do  this  !  or  cease  to  do  that !  By 
the  mere  absence  of  one  superstition,  and  of  the  sloth  engendered 
by  it,  the  plague  would  probably  cease  to  exist  throughout  Asia 
and  Africa.  Pronounce  meditatively  the  name  of  Jenner,  and 
ask  what  might  we  not  hope,  what  need  we  deem  unattainable, 
if  all  the  time,  the  effort,  the  skill,  which  we  waste  in  making 

*  I  do  not  consider  as  exceptions  the  thousands  that  abuse  themselves  by 
rote  with  lip-penitence,  or  the  wild  ravings  of  fanaticism;  for  these  persons 
at  the  very  time  they  speak  so  vehemently  of  the  wickedness  and  rottenness 
of  their  hearts,  are  then  commonly  the  warmest  in  their  own  good  opinion, 
covered  roi^yd  and  comfortable  in  the  wrap-rascal  of  self-hypocrisy. 

VOL.  II.  E 


98  THE    FKIEND. 

ourselves  miserable  through  vice,  and  vicious  through  misery, 
were  embodied  and  marshalled  to  a  systematic  war  against  the 
existing  evils  of  nature  !  No,  It  is  a  wicked  world  I  This  is  so 
generally  the  solution,  that  this  very  wickedness  is  assigned  by 
selfish  men,  as  *their  excuse  for  doing  nothing  to  render  it  better, 
and  for  opposing  those  who  would  make  the  attempt.  What 
have  not  Clarkson,  Granville  Sharp,  Wilberforce,  and  the  Society 
of  the  Friends,  effected  for  the  honor,  and  if  we  believe  in  a  retrib 
utive  Providence,  for  the  continuance  of  the  prosperity  of  the 
English  nation,  imperfectly  as  the  intellectual  and  moral  facul 
ties  of  the  people  at  large  are  developed  at  present !  What  may 
not  be  effected,  if  the  recent  discovery  of  the  means  of  educating 
nations  (freed,  however,  from  the  vile  sophistications  and  mutila 
tions  of  ignorant  mountebanks)  shall  have  been  applied  to  its  full 
extent !  Would  I  frame  to  myself  the  most  inspiring  represen 
tation  of  future  bliss,  which  my  mind  is  capable  of  comprehend 
ing,  it  would  be  embodied  to  me  in  the  idea  of  Bell  receiving,  at 
some  distant  period,  the  appropriate  reward  of  his  earthly  labors, 
when  thousands  and  ten  thousands  of  glorified  spirits,  whose  rea 
son  and  conscience  had,  through  his  efforts,  been  unfolded,  shall 
sing  the  song  of  their  own  redemption,  and  pouring  forth  praises 
to  God  and  to  their  Saviour,  shall  repeat  his  new  name  in  heaven, 
give  thanks  for  his  earthly  virtues,  as  the  chosen  instruments  of 
divine  mercy  to  themselves,  and  not  seldom  perhaps  turn  their 
eyes  toward  him,  as  from  the  sun  to  its  image  in  the  fountain, 
with  secondary  gratitude  and  the  permitted  utterance  of  a  hu 
man  love  !  Were  but  a  hundred  men  to  combine  a  deep  convic 
tion  that  virtuous  habits  may  be  formed  by  the  very  means  by 
which  knowledge  is  communicated,  that  men  may  be  made  bet 
ter,  not  only  in  consequence,  but  by  the  mode,  and  in  the  process, 
of  instruction ; — were  but  a  hundred  men  to  combine  that  clear 
conviction  of  this,  which  I  myself  at  this  moment  feel,  even  as  I 
feel  the  certainty  of  my  being,  with  the  perseverance  of  a  Clark- 
son  or  a  Bell,  the  promises  of  ancient  prophecy  would  disclose 
themselves  to  our  faith,  even  as  when  a  noble  castle  hidden  from 
us  by  an  intervening  mist,  discovers  itself  by  its  reflection  in  the 
tranquil  lake,  on  the^opposite  shore  of  which  we  stand  gazing.* 
What  an  awful  duty,  what  a  nurse  of  all  other,  the  fairest  vir- 

*  This  is,  I  fear,  too  complex,  too  accidental  an  image  to  be  conveyed  by 
words  to  those,  who  have  not  seen  it  themselves  in  nature. 


ESSAY    XIV.  99 

tues,  does  not  hope  become  !     We  are  bad  ourselves,  because  we 
despair  of  the  goodness  of  others. 

If  then  it  be  a  truth,  attested  alike  by  common  feeling  and 
common  sense,  that  the  greater  part  of  human  misery  depends 
directly  on  human  vices,  and  the  remainder  indirectly,  by  what 
means  can  we  act  on  men  so  as  to  remove  or  preclude  these 
vices,  and  purify  their  principle  of  moral  election  ?  The  question 
is  not  by  what  means  each  man  is  to  alter  his  own  character — 
in  order  to  this,  all  the  means  prescribed  and  all  the  aidances. 
given  by  religion,  may  be  necessary  for  him.  Vain,  of  them 
selves,  may  be 

the  sayings  of  the  wise 

In  ancient  and  in  modern  books  enrolled 
*  *  *  *  * 

Unless  he  feel  within 
Some  source  of  consolation  from  above, 
Secret  refreshings,  that  repair  his  strength 
And  fainting  spirits  uphold.* 

This  is  not  the  question.  Virtue  would  not  be  virtue,  could  it 
be  given  by  one  fellow-creature  to  another.  To  make  use  of  all 
the  means  and  appliances  in  our  power  to  the  actual  attainment 
of  rectitude,  is  the  abstract  of  the  duty  which  we  owe  to  our 
selves  :  to  supply  those  means  as  far  as  we  can,  comprises  our 
duty  to  others.  The  question  then  is,  what  are  these  means  ? 
Can  they  be  any  other  than  the  communication  of  knowledge, 
and  the  removal  of  those  evils  and  impediments  which  prevent 
its  reception  ?  It  may  not  be  in  our  power  to  combine  both,  but 
it  is  in  the  power  of  every  man  to  contribute  to  the  former,  who 
is  sufficiently  informed  to  feel  that  it  is  his  duty.  If  it  be  said, 
that  we  should  endeavor  not  so  much  to  remove  ignorance,  as  to 
make  the  ignorant  religious  ; — religion  herself,  through  her  sa 
cred  oracles,  answers  for  me,  that  all  effective  faith  pre-supposes 
knowledge  and  individual  conviction.  If  the  mere  acquiescence 
in  truth,  uncomprehended  and  unfathorned,  were  sufficient,  few 
indeed  would  be  the  vicious  and  the  miserable,  in  this  country 
at  least,  where  speculative  infidelity  is,  God  be  praised  !  confined 
to  a  small  number.  Like  bodily  deformity,  there  is  one  instance 
here  and  another  there  ;  but  three  in  one  place  are  already  an 
undue  proportion.  It  is  highly  worthy  of  observation,  that  the 
*  Samson  Agonistes. 


100  THE    FRIEND. 

inspired  writings  received  by  Christians  are  distinguishable  from 
all  other  books  pretending  to  inspiration,  from  the  scriptures  of 
the  Brahmins,  and  even  from  the  Koran,  in  their  strong  and 
frequent  recommendations  of  truth.  I  do  not  here  mean  verac 
ity,  which  can  not  but  be  enforced  in  every  code  which  appeals 
to  the  religious  principle  of  man  ;  but  knowledge.  This  is  not 
only  extolled  as  the  crown  and  honor  of  a  man,  but  to  seek  after 
it  is  again  and  again  commanded  us  as  one  of  our  most  sacred 
duties.  Yea,  the  very  perfection  and  final  bliss  of  the  glorified 
spirits  represented  by  the  Apostle  as  a  plain  aspect,  or  intuitive 
beholding,  of  truth  in  its  eternal  and  immutable  source.  Not 
that  knowledge  can  of  itself  do  all !  The  light  of  religion  is  not 
that  of  the  moon,  light  without  heat ;  but  neither  is  its  warmth 
that  of  the  stove,  warmth  without  light.  Religion  is  the  sun, 
the  warmth  of  which  indeed  swells,  and  stirs,  and  actuates  the 
life  of  nature,  but  who  at  the  same  time  beholds  all  the  growth 
of  life  with  a  master-eye,  makes  all  objects  glorious  on  which  he 
looks,  arid  by  that  glory  visible  to  all  others. 

But  though  knowledge  be  not  the  only,  yet  that  it  is  an  indis 
pensable  and  most  effectual  agent  in  the  direction  of  our  actions, 
one  consideration  will  convince  us.  It  is  an  undoubted  fact  of 
human  nature,  that  the  sense  of  impossibility  quenches  all  will. 
Sense  of  utter  inaptitude  does  the  same.  The  man  shuns  the 
beautiful  flame,  which  is  eagerly  grasped  at  by  the  infant.  The 
sense  of  a  disproportion  of  certain  after-harm  to  present  gratifica 
tion,  produces  effects  almost  equally  uniform  :  though  almost 
perishing  with  thirst,  we  should  dash  to  the  earth  a  goblet  of 
wine  in  which  we  had  seen  a  poison  infused,  though  the  poison 
were  without  taste  or  odor,  or  even  added  to  the  pleasures  of 
both.  Are  not  all  our  vices  equally  inapt  to  the  universal  end 
of  human  actions,  the  satisfaction  of  the  agent  ?  Are  not  their 
pleasures  equally  disproportionate  to  the  after-harm  ?  Yet  many 
a  maiden,  who  will  not  grasp  at  the  fire,  will  yet  purchase  a 
wreath  of  diamonds  at  the  price  of  her  health,  her  honor,  nay, 
— and  she  herself  knows  it  at  the  moment  of  her  choice, — at  the 
sacrifice  of  her  peace  and  happiness.  The  sot  would  reject  the 
poisoned  cup,  yet  the  trembling  hand  with  which  he  raises  his 
daily  or  hourly  draught  to  his  lips,  has  not  left  him  ignorant  that 
this  too  is  altogether  a  poison.  I  know  it  will  be  objected,  that 
the  consequences  foreseen  are  less  immediate  ;  that  they  are  dif- 


ESSAY    XIV.  101 

fused  over  a  larger  space  of  time  ;  and  that  the  slave  of  vice 
hopes  where  no  hope  is.  This,  however,  only  removes  the  ques 
tion  one  step  further  :  for  why  should  the  distance  or  diffusion 
of  known  consequences  produce  so  great  a  difference  ?  Why  are 
men  the  dupes  of  the  present  moment  ?  Evidently  because  the 
conceptions  are  indistinct  in  the  one  case,  and  vivid  in  the  other ; 
because  all  confused  conceptions  render  us  restless  ;  and  because 
restlessness  can  drive  us  to  vices  that  promise  no  enjoyment,  no 
not  even  the  cessation  of  that  restlessness.  This  is  indeed  the 
dread  punishment  attached  by  nature  to  habitual  vice,  that  its 
impulses  wax  as  its  motives  wane.  No  object,  not  even  the 
light  of  a  solitary  taper  in  the  far  distance,  tempts  the  benighted 
mind  from  before  ;  but  its  own  restlessness  dogs  it  from  behind, 
as  with  the  iron  goad  of  destiny.  What  then  is  or  can  be  the 
preventive,  the  remedy,  the  counteraction,  but  the  habituation  of 
the  intellect  to  clear,  distinct,  and  adequate  conceptions  concern 
ing  all  things  that  are  the  possible  object  of  clear  conception, 
and  thus  to  reserve  the  deep  feelings  which  belong,  as  by  a  nat 
ural  right,  to  those  obscure  ideas*  that  are  necessary  to  the 
moral  perfection  of  the  human  being,  notwithstanding,  yea,  even 
in  consequence,  of  their  obscurity — to  reserve  these  feelings,  I  re 
peat,  for  objects,  which  their  very  sublimity  renders  indefinite, 
no  less  than  their  indefiniteness  renders  them  sublime, — namely, 
to  the  ideas  of  being,  form,  life,  the  reason,  the  law  of  conscience, 
freedom,  immortality,  God  !  To  connect  with  the  objects  of  our 
senses  the  obscure  notions  and  consequent  vivid  feelings,  wrhich 
are  due  only  to  immaterial  and  permanent  things,  is  profanation 
relatively  to  the  heart,  and  superstition  in  the  understanding. 
It  is  in  this  sense,  that  the  philosophic  Apostle  calls  covetousness 
idolatry.  Could  we  emancipate  ourselves  from  the  bedimming 
influences  of  custom,  and  the  transforming  witchcraft  of  early 

*  I  have  not  expressed  myself  as  clearly  as  I  could  wish.  But  the  truth 
of  the  assertion,  that  deep  feeling  has  a  tendency  to  combine  with  obscure 
ideas,  in  preference  to  distinct  and  clear  notions,  may  be  proved  by  the 
history  of  fanatics  and  fanaticism  in  all  ages  and  countries.  The  odium 
Iheohgicum  is  even  proverbial :  and  it  is  the  common  complaint  of  philoso 
phers  and  philosophic  historians,  that  the  passions  of  the  disputants  are 
commonly  violent  in  proportion  to  the  subtlety  and  obscurity  of  the  ques 
tions  in  dispute.  Nor  is  this  fact  confined  to  professional  theologians : 
for  whole  nations  have  displayed  the  same  agitations,  and  have  sacrificed 
national  policy  to  the  more  powerful  interest  of  a  controverted  obscurity. 


102  THE    FRIEND. 

associations,  we  should  see  as  numerous  tribes  offetisch-\voYship- 
ers  in  the  streets  of  London  and  Paris,  as  we  hear  of  011  the 
coasts  of  Africa. 


ESSAY    XV. 

A  palace  when  'tis  that  which  it  should  be 
Leaves  growing,  and  stands  such,  or  else  decays ; 
With  him  who  dwells  there,  'tis  not  so :  for  he 
Should  still  urge  upward,  and  his  fortune  raise. 

Our  bodies  had  their  morning,  have  their  noon, 
And  shall  not  better — the  next  change  is  night ; 
But  their  far  larger  guest,  t'  whom  sun  and  moon 
Are  sparks  and  short-lived,  claims  another  right. 

The  noble  soul  by  age  grows  lustier, 
Her  appetite  and  her  digestion  mend ; 
We  must  not  starve  nor  hope  to  pamper  her 
With  woman's  milk  and  pap  unto  the  end. 

Provide  you  manlier  diet !  DONNE.* 

I  AM  fully  aware,  that  what  I  am  writing  and  have  written  (in 
these  latter  essays  at  least)  will  expose  me  to  the  censure  of 
some,  as  bewildering  myself  and  readers  with  metaphysics  ;  to 
the  ridicule  of  others  as  a  school-boy  declaimer  on  old  and  worn- 
out  truisms  or  exploded  fancies  ;  and  to  the  objection  of  most  as 
obscure.  The  last  real  or  supposed  defect  has  already  received 
an  answer  both  in  the  preceding  essays,  and  in  the  appendix  to 
my  first  Lay-Sermon,  entitled  The  Statesman's  Manual.  Of  the 
former  two,  I  shall  take  the  present  opportunity  of  declaring  my 
sentiments  ;  especially  as  I  have  already  received  a  hint  that  my 
idol,  Milton,  has  represented  metaphysics  as  the  subject  which  the 
bad  spirits  in  hell  delight  in  discussing.  And  truly,  if  I  had  ex 
erted  my  subtlety  and  invention  in  persuading  myself  and  others 
that  we  are  but  living  machines,  and  that,  as  one  of  the  late  fol 
lowers  of  Hobbes  and  Hartley  has  expressed  the  system,  the  as- 

*  Letter  to  Sir  Henry  Goodere.  The  words  in  italics  are  substituted 
for  the  original. — Ed. 


ESSAY    XV.  103 

sassin  and  his  dagger  are  equally  fit  objects  of  moral  esteem  and 
abhorrence  ;  or  if  with  a  writer  of  wider  influence  and  higher 
authority,  I  had  reduced  all  virtue  to  a  selfish  prudence  eked  out 
ly  superstition,* — for,  assuredly,  a  creed  which  takes  its  central 
point  in  conscious  selfishness,  whatever  be  the  forms  or  names 
that  act  on  the  selfish  passion,  a  ghost  or  a  constable,  can  have 
but  a  distant  relationship  to  that  religion,  which  places  its  essence 
in  our  loving  our  neighbor  as  ourselves,  and  God  above  all, — I 
know  not,  by  what  arguments  I  could  repel  the  sarcasm.  But 
what  are  my  metaphysics  ? — Merely  the  referring  of  the  mind  to 
its  own  consciousness  for  truths  indispensable  to  its  own  happi 
ness  !  To  what  purpose  do  I,  or  am  I  about  to,  employ  them  ? 
To  perplex  our  clearest  notions  and  living  moral  instincts  ?  To 
deaden  the  feelings  of  will  and  free  power,  to  extinguish  the  light 
of  love  and  of  conscience,  to  make  myself  and  others  worthless, 
soulless,  God-less  ?  No  !  to  expose  the  folly  and  the  legerdemain 
of  those  who  have  thus  abused  the  blessed  machine  of  language ; 
to  support  all  old  and  venerable  truths  ;  and  by  them  to  support, 
to  kindle,  to  project  the  spirit ;  to  make  the  reason  spread  light 
over  our  feelings,  to  make  our  feelings,  with  their  vital  warmth, 
actualize  our  reason  : — these  are  my  objects,  these  are  my  sub 
jects  ;  and  are  these  the  metaphysics  which  the  bad  spirits  in 
hell  delight  in  ? 

But  how  shall  I  avert  the  scorn  of  those  critics  who  laugh  at 
the  oldness  of  my  topics,  evil  and  good,  necessity  and  arbitra 
ment,  immortality  and  the  ultimate  aim  ?  By  what  shall  I  re 
gain  their  favor?  My  themes  must  be  new,  a  French  constitu 
tion  ;  a  balloon  ;  a  change  of  ministry  ;  a  fresh  batch  of  kings  on 
the  Continent,  or  of  peers  in  our  happier  island ;  or  who  had  the 
best  of  it  of  two  parliamentary  gladiators,  and  whose  speech,  on 
the  subject  of  Europe  bleeding  at  a  thousand  wounds,  or  our  own, 
country  struggling  for  herself  and  all  human  nature,  was  cheered 

*  "  And  from  this  account  of  obligation  it  follows,  that  -we  are  obliged  to 
nothing  but  what  we  ourselves  are  to  gain  or  lose  something  by ;  for  noth 
ing  else  can  be  a  violent  motive  to  us.  As  we  should  not  be»obliged  to 
obey  the  laws,  or  the  magistrate,  unless  rewards  or  punishments,  pleasure 
or  pain,  somehow  or  other,  depended  upon  our  obedience  ;  so  neither  should 
we,  without  the  same  reason,  be  obliged  to  do  what  is  right,  to  practise 
virtue,  or  to  obey  the  commands  of  God." — Paley,  Moral  and  Political  Phi 
losophy,  B.  II.  c.  2,  ct  passim. — Ed. 


104  THE    FRIEND. 

by  the  greatest  number  of  "  laughs*,"  ;t  loud  laughs,"  arid  "  very 
loud  laughs  :" — (which,  carefully  marked  by  italics,  form  most 
conspicuous  and  strange  parentheses  in  the  newspaper  reports.) 
Or  if  I  must  be  philosophical,  the  last  chemical  discoveries, — 
provided  I  do  not  trouble  my  reader  with  the  principle  which 
gives  them  their  highest  interest,  and  the  character  of  intellec 
tual  grandeur  to  the  discoverer  ;  or  the  last  shower  of  stones,  and 
that  they  were  supposed,  by  certain  philosophers,  to  have  been 
projected  from  some  volcano  in  the  moon, — care  being  taken  not 
to  add  any  of  the  cramp  reasons  ibr  this  opinion  !  Something 
new,  however,  it  must  be,  quite  new  and  quite  out  of  themselves  ! 
for  whatever  is  within  them,  whatever  is  deep  within  them,  must 
be  as  old  as  the  first  dawn  of  human  reason.  But  to  find  no 
contradiction  in  the  union  of  old  and  new,  to  contemplate  the 
Ancient  of  days  with  feelings  as  fresh,  as  if  they  then  sprang 
forth  at  his  own  Jiat — this  characterizes  the  minds  that  feel  the 
riddle  of  the  world,  and  may  help  to  unravel  it !  To  carry  on 
the  feelings  of  childhood  into  the  powers  of  manhood,  to  combine 
the  child's  sense  of  wonder  and  novelty  with  the  appearances 
which  every  day  for  perhaps  forty  years  has  rendered  familiar, 

With  sun  and  moon  and  stars  throughout  the  year, 
And  man  and  woman 

this  is  the  character  and  privilege  of  genius,  and  one  of  the  marks 
which  distinguish  genius  from  talent.  And  so  to  represent  famil 
iar  objects  as  to  awaken  the  minds  of  others  to  a  like  freshness 
of  sensation  concerning  them — that  constant  accompaniment  of 
mental,  no  less  than  of  bodily,  health — to  the  same  modest  ques 
tioning  of  a  self-discovered  and  intelligent  ignorance,  which,  like 
the  deep  and  massy  foundations  of  a  Roman  bridge,  forms  half 
of  the  whole  structure — (prudem  interrogate  dimidium  sci- 
entice,  says  Lord  Bacon) — this  is  the  prime  merit  of  genius,  and 
its  most  unequivocal  mode  of  manifestation.  Who  has  not,  a 
thousand  times,  seen  it  snow  upon  water  ?  Who  has  not  seen  it 
with  a  new  feeling,  since  he  has  read  Burns's  comparison  of  sen 
sual  pleasure, 

To  snow  that  falls  upon  a  river, 

A  moment  white — then  gone  forever  !* 

*  Tarn  O'Shanter.— JStf. 


ESSAY    XV.  105 

In  philosophy  equally,  as  in  poetry,  genius  produces  the  strong 
est  impressions  of  novelty,  while  it  rescues  the  stalest  arid  most 
admitted  truths  from  the  impotence  caused  by  the  very  circum 
stance  of  their  universal  admission.  Extremes  meet ; — a  proverb, 
by  the  by,  to  collect  and  explain  all  the  instances  arid  exemplifi 
cations  of  which,  would  constitute  arid  exhaust  all  philosophy. 
Truths,  of  all  others  the  most  awful  and  mysterious,  yet  being  at 
the  same  time  of  universal  interest,  are  too  often  considered  as  so 
true  that  they  lose  all  the  powers  of  truth,  and  lie  bed-ridden  in 
the  dormitory  of  the  soul,  side  by  side  with  the  most  despised  and 
exploded  errors. 

But  as  the  class  of  critics,  whose  contempt  I  have  anticipated, 
commonly  consider  themselves  as  men  of  the  world,  instead  of 
hazarding  additional  sneers  by  appealing  to  the  authorities  of  re 
cluse  philosophers, — for  such,  in  spite  of  all  history,  the  men  who 
have  distinguished  themselves  by  profound  thought,  are  generally 
deemed,  from  Plato  and  Aristotle  to  Cicero,  and  from  Bacon  to 
Berkeley — I  will  refer  them  to  the  darling  of  the  polished  court 
of  Augustus,  to  the  man,  whose  works  have  been  in  all  ages 
deemed  the  models  of  good  sense,  and  are  still  the  pocket  com 
panion  of  those  who  pride  themselves  on  uniting  the  scholar  with 
the  gentleman.  This  accomplished  man  of  the  world  has  given 
us  an  account  of  the  subjects  of  conversation  between  himself 
and  the  illustrious  statesmen  who  governed,  and  the  brightest 
luminaries  who  then  adorned,  the  empire  of  the  civilized  world  : 

Sermo  oritur  non  de  villis  domibusve  alienis, 

Nee  male,  nccne,  Icpus  aaltet.     Sed  quod  magis  ad  nos 

Perlinet,  ft  nescire  malwm  est,  agitamus :  utrumnc 

Divitiit  homines,  an  sint  virtute  beati  ? 

Quidve  ad  amicitias,  itsus  rectumne,  trahat  nos  ; 

Et  qua  sit  natura  boni,  summumque  quid  ejuft. — Hon.* 

Berkeley  indeed  asserts,  and  is  supported  in  his  assertion  by 
Lord  Bacon  and  Sir  Walter  Raleigh,  that  without  an  habitual  in- 

*  Serm.  II.  vi.  71.  Conversation  arises  not  concerning  the  country  seats 
or  families  of  strangers,  nor  whether  the  dancing  hare  performed  well  or 
ill.  But  we  discuss  what  more  nearly  concerns  us,  and  which  it  is  an  evil 
not  to  know  :  whether  men  are  made  happy  by  riches  or  by  virtue :  whether 
interest  or  a  love  of  virtue  should  lead  us  to  friendship ;  and  in  what  con 
sists  the  nature  of  good,  and  what  is  the  ultimate  or  supreme  good — the 
tummum  bonum. 


106  THE    FKIEND. 

terest  in  these  subjects,  a  man  may  be  a  dexterous  intriguer,  but 
never  can  be  a  statesman.  Would  to  Heaven  that  the  verdict  to 
be  passed  on  my  labors  depended  on  those  who  least  needed  them  ! 
The  water-lily  in  the  midst  of  waters  lifts  up  its  broad  leaves, 
and  expands  its  petals  at  the  first  pattering  of  the  shower,  and 
rejoices  in  the  rain  with  a  quicker  sympathy,  than  the  parched 
shrub  in  the  sandy  desert. 

God  created  man  in  his  own  image.  To  be  the  image  of  his 
own  eternity  created  he  man  !  Of  eternity  and  self-existence 
what  other  likeness  is  possible,  but  immortality  and  moral  self- 
determination  ?  In  addition  to  sensation,  perception,  and  practi 
cal  judgment — instinctive  or  acquirable — concerning  the  notices 
furnished  by  the  organs  of  perception,  all  which  in  kind  at  least, 
the  dog  possesses  in  common  with  his  master  ;  in  addition  to 
these,  God  gave  us  reason,  and  with  reason  he  gave  us  reflective 
self- consciousness ;  gave  us  principles,  distinguished  from  the 
maxims  and  generalizations  of  outward  experience  by  their  abso 
lute  and  essential  universality  and  necessity  ;  and  above  all,  by 
superadding  to  reason  the  mysterious  faculty  of  free-Avill  and  con 
sequent  personal  amenability,  he  gave  us  conscience — that  law 
of  conscience,  which  in  the  power,  and  as  the  indwelling  word, 
of  a  holy  and  omnipotent  legislator  commands  us — from  among 
the  numerous  ideas  mathematical  and  philosophical,  which  the 
reason  by  the  necessity  of  its  own  excellence  creates  for  itself, — 
unconditionally  commands  us  to  attribute  reality,  and  actual  ex 
istence-,  to  those  ideas  and  to  those  only,  without  which  the  con 
science  itself  would  be  baseless  and  contradictory,  to  the  ideas  of 
soul,  of  free-will,  of  immortality,  and  of  God.  To  God,  as  the 
reality  of  the  conscience  and  the  source  of  all  obligation  ;  to  free 
will,  as  the  power  of  the  human  being  to  maintain  the  obedience 
which  God  through  the  conscience  has  commanded,  against  all 
the  might  of  nature  ;  and  to  the  immortality  of  the  soul,  as  a 
state  in  which  the  weal  and  woe  of  man  shall  be  proportioned  to 
his  moral  worth.  With  this  faith  all  nature, 

all  the  mighty  world 

Of  eye  and  car * 

presents  itself  to  us,  now  as  the  aggregated  material  of  duty,  and 
new  as  a  vision  of  the  Most  High  revealing  to  us  the  mode,  and 

*  Wordsworth.    Lines  near  Tintern  Abbey. — Ed. 


ESSAY    XVI.  107 

time,  and  particular  instance  of  applying  and  realizing  that  uni 
versal  rule,  pre-established  in  the  heart  of  our  reason. 

"  The  displeasure  of  some  readers,"  to  use  Berkeley's  words,* 
"  may,  perhaps,  be  incurred  by  my  having  surprised  them  into 
certain  reflections  and  inquiries,  lor  which  they  have  no  curiosity. 
But  perhaps  some  others  may  be  pleased  to  find  themselves  car 
ried  into  ancient  times,  even  tliough  ikey  should  consider  the 
hoary  maxims,  defended  in  these  essays,  barely  as  hints  to 
awaken  and  exercise  the  inquisitive  reader,  on  points  not  beneath 
the  attention  of  the  ablest  men.  Those  great  men,  Pythagoras, 
Plato,  arid  Aristotle,  men  the  most  consummate  in  politics,  who 
founded  states,  or  instructed  princes,  or  wrote  most  accurately  on 
public  government,  were  at  the  same  time  the  most  acute  at  all 
abstracted  and  sublime  speculations  ; — the  clearest  light  being 
ever  necessary  to  guide  the  most  important  actions.  And  what 
ever  the  world  may  opine,  he  who  hath  not  much  meditated 
upon  God,  the  human  mind,  and  the  summuni  bonum,  may  pos 
sibly  make  a  thriving  earth-worm,  but  will  most  indubitably 
make  a  blundering  patriot  and  a  sorry  statesman." 


ESSAY  XVI. 

Blind  is  that  soul  which  from  (his  truth  can  swerve, 

No  state  stands  sure,  but  on  the  grounds  of  right, 

Of  virtue,  knowledge ;  judgment  to  preserve, 

And  all  the  pow'rs  of  learning  requisite : 

Though  other  shifts  a  present  turn  may  serve, 

Yet  in  the  trial  they  will  weigh  too  light.  DANIEL,  f 

I  EARNESTLY  entreat  the  reader  not  to  be  dissatisfied  either 
with  himself  or  with  the  author,  if  he  should  not  at  once  under 
stand  every  part  of  the  preceding  essay  ;  but  rather  to  consider 
it  as  a  mere  annunciation  of  a  magnificent  theme,  the  different 
parts  of  which  are  to  be  demonstrated  and  developed,  explained, 
illustrated,  and  exemplified  in  the  progress  of  the  work.  I  like- 

*  Siris,  350.     The  words  in  italics  are  substituted  for  the  original. — Ed. 
f  MuKophiius.    The  Hue  iu  italics  in  gubstituted. — Ed 


108  THE    FRIEND. 

wise  entreat  him  to  peruse  with  attention  and  with  candor,  the 
weighty  extract  from  the  judicious  Hooker,  prefixed  as  the  motto 
to  a  following  essay.*  In  works  of  reasoning,  as  distinguished 
from  narrations  of  events  or  statements  of  facts  ;  but  more  par 
ticularly  in  works,  the  object  of  which  is  to  make  us  better  ac 
quainted  with  our  own  nature,  a  writer  whose  meaning  is  every 
where  comprehended  as  quickly  as  his  sentences  can  be  read,  may 
indeed  have  produced  an  amusing  composition,  nay,  by  awaken 
ing  and  re-enlivening  our  recollections,  a  useful  one  ;  but  most  as 
suredly  he  will  not  have  added  either  to  the  stock  of  our  knowl 
edge,  or  to  the  vigor  of  our  intellect.  For  how  can  we  gather 
strength,  but  by  exercise  ?  How  can  a  truth,  new  to  us,  be  made 
our  own  without  examination  and  self-questioning — any  new 
truth,  I  mean,  that  relates  to  the  properties  oi'  the  mind,  and  its 
various  faculties  and  affections  ?  But  whatever  demands  eflbrt, 
requires  time.  Ignorance  seldom  vaults  into  knowledge,  but 
passes  into  it  through  an  intermediate  state  of  obscurity,  even  as 
night  into  day  through  twilight.  All  speculative  truths  begin 
with  a  postulate,  even  the  truths  of  geometry.  They  all  suppose 
an  act  of  the  will ;  for  in  the  moral  being  lies  the  source  of  the 
intellectual.  The  first  step  to  knowledge,  or  rather  the  previous 
condition  of  all  insight  into  truth,  is  to  dare  commune  with  our 
very  and  permanent  self.  It  is  Warburton's  remark,  not  the 
Friend's,  that  of  all  literary  exercitations,  whether  designed  for 
the  use  or  entertainment  of  the  world,  there  are  none  of  so  much 
importance,  or  so  immediately  our  concern,  as  those  which  let  us 
into  the  knowledge  of  our  own  nature.  Others  may  exercise  the 
understanding  or  amuse  the  imagination  ;  but  these  only  can  im 
prove  the  heart  and  form  the  human  mind  to  wisdom. 

The  recluse  hermit  ofttimes  more  doth  know 

Of  the  world's  inmost  ivheels,  than  worldlings  can. 

As  man  is  of  the  world,  the  heart  of  man 

Is  an  epitome  of  God's  great  book 

Of  creatures,  and  men  need  no  farther  look.  DONNE,  f 

The  higher  a  man's  station,  the  more  arduous  and  full  of  peril 
his  duties,  the  more  comprehensive  should  his  foresight  be,  the 
more  rooted  his  tranquillity  concerning  life  and  death.  But  these 

*  Essay  IV.  Sect,  On  the  Principles  of  Political  Knowledge.  See  Eccl 
Pol.  L  c.  I.  Z.—W. 

f  Eclogue.    The  words  in  italics  are  substituted. — Ed. 


ESSAY    XVI.  109 

are  gifts  which  no  experience  can  bestow,  but  the  experience 
from  within  :  and  there  is  a  nobleness  of  the  whole  personal 
being,  to  which  the  contemplation  of  all  events  arid  phenomena 
in  the  light  of  the  three  master  ideas,  announced  jn  the  foregoing 
pages,  can  alone  elevate  the  spirit.  Atlima  sapiens,  says  Gior 
dano  Bruno, — and  let  the  sublime  piety  of  the  passage  excuse 
some  intermixture  of  error,  or  rather  let  the  words,  as  they  well 
may,  be  interpreted  in  a  safe  sense — anima  sapiens  non  timet 
mortem,  immo  interdum  illam  idtro  appetit,  illi  ultro  occurrit. 
Manet  quippe  substantiam  oninem  pro  duratione  etemif.as,  pro 
loco  imniensitas,  pro  actu  omnifonnitas.  Non  levem  igitur  ac 
futilem,  atqui  gravissimam  perfectoque  komine  dignissimam 
contemplation-is  partein  per&equimur,  ubi  divinitatis,  nat.urceque 
splendorem,  fusionem,  et  communicationem,  non  in  cibo,  potu, 
et  ignobiliore  quadam  materia  cum  attonitorum  secido  perquiri- 
mus ;  sed  in  augusta  Omnipotentis  regia,  immenso  cetheris 
spatio,  in  injinita  naturcc  gemince  omnis  ficntis  ct  omnia  facien- 
tis  potcntia,  uncle  tot  astrorum,  mundormn,  inquam,  et  numi- 
num,  uni  aUissimo  concinentium  atque  saltantium  absque 
numero  atque  Jine  juxta  projiositos  ubique  fines  atque  ordines 
contemplamurt  Sic  ex  visibdium  ceterno,  immenso  et  innu- 
merabili  cffectu  scmpiterna  iminensa  ilia  majestas  atque  bonitas 
intellecta  compicitur,  proque  sua  dignitate  innumerabilium 
deorum  (inundorum  dico)  adsistcntia,  concincntia,  et  gloria 
ipsius  enarratione,  immo  adoctdos  expressa  condone  glorijicatur. 
Cui  immenso  mensum  non  quadrabit  domicilium  atque  tern- 
plum  ; — ad  cujus  majestatis  plenitudinem  agnoscendam  atque 
percolcndam,  numerafrilium  ministrorum  nullus  esset  ordo. 
Eui  igitur  ad  omnifonnis  Dei  omnifonnem  imaginem  conjecte- 
mus  oculos,  vivum  ct  magnum  illius  admiremur  simulacrum  ! — 
Hinc  miracalum  magnum  a  Trismegisto  appellabatur  homo, 
qui  in  Dcum  transcat  quasi  ipse  sit  Deus,  qui  conatur  omnia 
fieri  sicut  Deus  est  omnia  ;  ad  objectum  sine  fine,  ubique  tamen 
Jiniendo,  contendit,  sicut  injinitus  cst  Deus,  immensus,  ubique 
totus* 

*  De  motiade,  &c.  A  wise  spirit  does  not  fear  death,  nay,  sometimes — 
as  in  cases  of  voluntary  martyrdom — seeks  and  goes  forth  to  meet  it,  of  its 
own  accord.  For  there  awaits  all  actual  beings,  for  duration  eternity,  for 
place  immensity,  far  action  omniformity.  We  pursue,  therefore,  a  species 
of  contemplation  not  light  or  futile,  but  the  weightiest  and  most  worthy  of 


110  THE    FRIEND. 

If  this  be  regarded  as  the  fancies  of  an  enthusiast,  by  such  as 

deem  themselves  most  free, 

When  they  within  this  gross  and  visible  sphere 
Chain  down  the  winged  soul,  scoffing  ascent, 
Proud  in  their  meanness, * 

by  such  as  pronounce  every  man  out  of  his  senses  who  has  not 
lost  his  reason  ;  even  such  men  may  find  some  weight  in*  the 

an  accomplished  man,  while  we  examine  and  seek  for  the  splendor,  the  in 
terfusion,  and  communication  of  the  Divinity  and  of  nature,  not  in  meats 
or  drink,  or  any  yet  ignoble  matter,  with  the  race  of  the  thunder-stricken ; 
but  in  the  august  palace  of  the  Omnipotent,  in  the  illimitable  ethereal  space, 
in  the  infinite  power,  that  creates  all  things,  and  is  the  abiding  being  of  all 
things. 

There  we  may  contemplate  the  host  of  stars,  of  worlds,  and  their  guar 
dian  deities,  numbers  without  number,  each  in  its  appointed  sphere,  singing 
together,  and  dancing  in  adoration  of  the  One  Most  High.  Thus  from  the 
perpetual,  immense,  and  innumerable  goings  on  of  the  visible  world,  that 
sempiternal  and  absolutely  infinite  Majesty  is  intellectually  beheld,  and  is 
glorified  according  to  his  glory,  by  the  attendance  and  choral  symphonies 
of  innumerable  gods,  who  utter  forth  the  glory  of  their  ineffable  Creator  in 
the  expressive  language  of  vision !  To  him  illimitable,  a  limited  temple 
will  not  correspond — to  the  acknowledgment  and  due  wqf  ship  of  the  pleni 
tude  of  his  majesty  there  wrould  be  no  proportion  in  any  innumerable  army 
of  ministrant  spirits.  Let  us  then  cast  our  eyes  upon  the  omniform  image 
of  the  attributes  of  the  all-creating  Supreme,  nor  admit  any  representation 
of  his  excellency  but  the  living  universe,  which  he  has  created !  Thence 
was  man*  entitled  by  Trismegistus,  the  great  miracle,  inasmuch  as  he  has 
been  made  capable  of  entering  into  union  with  God,  as  if  he  w^ere  himself  a 
divine  nature ;  tries  to  become  all  things,  even  as  in  God  all  things  are ; 
and  in  limitless  progression  of  limited  states  of  being,  urges  onward  to  the 
ultimate  aim,  even  as  God  is  simultaneously  infinite,  and  everywhere  all ! 

Giordano  Bruno,  the  friend  of  Sir  Philip  Sidney  and  Fulk  Greville,  was 
burnt  under  pretence  of  atheism,  at  Rome,  on  the  17th  of  February,  1599- 
1600  (Scioppio  ends  his  narrative  in  these  words  :  Sic  ustulntus  misere  periit, 
renunciaturus,  credo,  in  reliquis  iJlis,  qaos  finxit,  mundis,  guonam  pacto 
homines  blasphemi  et  impii  a  Romania  tractari  solent.  Hie  itaque  modus  in 
Roma  est,  quo  contra  homines  impios  ct  monstra  hujusmoui  proccdi  a  nobis 
solet. — Ed.)  His  works  are  perhaps  the  scarcest  books  ever  printed.  They 
are  singularly  interesting  as  portraits  of  a  vigorous  mind  struggling  after 
truth,  amid  many  prejudices,  which  from  the  state  of  the  Romish  Church, 
in  which  he  was  born,  have  a  claim  to  much  indulgence.  One  of  them  (en 
titled  Ember  Week)  is  curious  for  its  lively  accounts  of  the  rude  state  of 
London,  at  that  time,  both  as  to  the  streets  and  the  manners  of  the  citizens. 

*  Poetical  Works  VIL  p.  83.—J& 


ESSAY    XVI.  Ill 

historical  fact  that  from  persons,  who  had  previously  strengthened 
their  intellects  and  feelings  by  the  contemplation  of  principles — . 
principles,  the  actions  correspondent  to  which  involve  one  half 
of  their  consequences,  by  their  ennobling  influence  on  the  agent's 
own  soul,  and  have  omnipotence,  as  the  pledge  for  the  remainder 
— we  have  derived  the  surest  and  most  general  maxims  of  pru 
dence.  Of  high  value  are  they  all.  Yet  there  is  one  among 
them  worth  all  the  rest,  which  in  the  fullest  and  primary  sense 
of  the  word  is,  indeed,  the  maxim,  that  is,  maximum,  of  human 
prudence  ;  and  of  which  history  itself,  in  all  that  makes  it  most 
worth  studying,  is  one  continued  comment  and  exemplification.  It 
is  this  :  that  there  is  a  wisdom  higher  than  prudence,  to  which 
prudence  stands  in  the  same  relation  as  the  mason  and  carpenter 
to  the  genial  and  scientific  architect  ;  and  it  is  from  the  habits 
of  thinking  arid  feeling,  which  in  this  wisdom  had  their  first  for 
mation,  that  our  Nelsons  and  Wellingtons  inherit  that  glorious 
hardihood,  which  completes  me  undertaking,  ere  the  contemptuous 
calculator,  who  has  left  nothing  omitted  in  his  scheme  of  proba 
bilities,  except  the  might  of  the  human  mind,  has  finished  his 
pretended  proof  of  its  impossibility.  You  look  to  facts,  and  pro 
fess  to  take  experience  for  your  guide.  Well !  I  too  appeal  to  ex 
perience  :  and  let  facts  be  the  ordeal  of  my  position  !  Therefore, 
although  I  have  in  this  and  the  preceding  essays  quoted  more 
frequently  and  copiously  than  I  shall  permit  myself  to  do  in  fu 
ture,  I  owe  it  to  the  cause  I  am  pleading  not  to  deny  myself  the 
gratification  of  supporting  this  connection  of  practical  heroism 
with  previous  habits  of  philosophic  thought,  by  a  singularly  ap- 

(Z<j  cena  de  le  ceneri.  See  particularly  the  second  dialogue. — Ed.)  The 
most  industrious  historians  of  speculative  philosophy,  have  not  been  able  to 
procure  more  than  a  few  of  his  works.  Accidentally  I  have  been  more  for 
tunate  in  this  respect,  than  those  who  have  written  hitherto  on  the  un 
happy  philosopher  of  Nola ;  as  out  of  eleven  works,  the  titles  of  which  are 
preserved  to  us,  I  have  had  an  opportunity  of  perusing  six.  I  was  told, 
when  in  Germany,  that  there  is  a  complete  collection  of  them  in  the  royal 
library  at  Copenhagen.  If  so,  it  is  unique. 

(Wagner  has  collected  and  published  seven  of  the  Italian  works  of  Bruno: 
Leipzig,  1830.  These  are,  11  Candelajo  ;  La  cena  de  le  ceneri  ;  De  la  causa, 
principio  et  uno ;  De  tinfinito,  universo  e  mondi ;  Spaccio  de  la  bestia  trion- 
fante  ;  Cabala  del  caballo  Pegaseo  ;  and  De  gli  eroici  furori.  Two  others 
are  mentioned  by  Bruno,  himself  in  the  Cena,  <fcc. ;  namelv,  L'arca  di  Noe. 
and  Puryatorio  dell'  inferno.  Wagner  could  not  discover  these.  The  titles 
of  tw«uty-thr««  works  ia  Latin  are  given  by  Wagner. — Ed.) 


112  THE    FRIEND. 

propriate  passage  from  an  author  whose  works  can  be  called  rare 
only  from  their  being,  I  fear,  rarely  read,  however  commonly 
talked  of.  It  is  the  instance  of  Xenophon,  as  stated  by  Lord 
Bacon,  who  would  himself  furnish  an  equal  instance,  if  there 
could  be  found  an  equal  commentator. 

"  It  is  of  Xenophon  the  philosopher,  who  went  from  Socrates' 
school  into  Asia,  in  the  expedition  of  Cyrus  the  younger,  against 
King  Artaxerxes.  This  Xenophon,  at  that  time,  was  very  young, 
and  never  had  seen  the  wars  before  ;  neither  had  any  command 
in  the  army,  but  only  followed  the  war  as  a  volunteer,  for  the  love 
and  conversation  of  Proxenus,  his  friend.  He  was  present  when 
Falinus  came  in  message  from  the  great  King  to  the  Grecians, 
after  that  Cyrus  was  slain  in  the  field,  arid  they,  a  handful  of 
men,  left  to  themselves  in  the  midst  of  the  King's  territories, 
cut  off  from  their  country  by  many  navigable  rivers,  and  many 
hundred  miles.  The  message  imparted,  that  they  should  deliver 
up  their  arms  and  submit  themselves  to.  the  King's  mercy.  To 
which  message,  before  answer  was  made,  divers  of  the  army  conr 
ferred  familiarly  with  Falinus,  and  amongst  the  rest  Xenophon 
happened  to  say  :  '  Why,  Falinus  !  we  have  now  but  these  two 
things  left,  our  arms  and  our  virtue  ;  arid  if  we  yield  up  our 
arms,  how  shall  we  make  use  of  our  virtue  ?'  Whereto  Falinus, 
smiling  on  him,  said,  '  If  I  be  not  deceived,  young  gentleman, 
you  are  an  Athenian,  and  I  believe  you  study  philosophy,  and  it 
is  pretty  that  you  say  ;  but  you  .are  much  abused,  if  you  think 
your  virtue  can  withstand  the  King's  power.'  Here  was  the 
scorn  :  the  wonder  followed  ; — which  was,  that  this  young  schol 
ar  or  philosopher,  after  all  the  captains  were  murdered  in  par 
ley,  by  treason,  conducted  those  tea  thousand  foot  through  the 
heart  of  all  the  King's  high  countries  from  Babylon  to  Grascia, 
in  safety,  in  despite  of  all  the  King's  forces,  to  the  astonishment 
of  the  world,  and  the  encouragement  of  the  Grecians,  in  time 
succeeding,  to  make  invasion  upon  the  kings  of  Persia  ;  as  was 
after  purposed  by  Jason  the  Thessalian,  attempted  by  Agesilaus 
the  Spartan,  and  achieved  by  Alexander  the  Macedonian,  all 
upon  the  ground  of  the  act  of  that  young  scholar.  "^ 

Often  have  I  reflected  with  awe  on  the  great  and  dispropor 
tionate  power,  which  an  individual  of  no  extraordinary  talents  or 
attainments  may  exert,  by  merely  throwing  off  all  restraint  of 
*  Advancement  of  Learning.    B.  L — Ed. 


ESSAY    XVI.  113 

conscience.  What  then,  must  not  be  the  power,  where  an  indi 
vidual,  of  consummate  wickedness,  can  organize  into  the  unity 
and  rapidity  of  an  individual  will  all  the  natural  and  artificial 
forces  of  a  populous  and  wicked  nation  ?  And  could  we  bring 
within  the  field  of  imagination,  the  devastation  effected  in  the 
moral  world,  by  the  violent  removal  of  old  customs,  familiar 
sympathies,  willing  reverences,  and  habits  of  subordination  al 
most  naturalized  into  instinct  ;  of  the  mild  influences  of  reputa 
tion,  and  the  other  ordinary  props  and  aidances  of  our  infirm  vir 
tue,  or  at  least,  if  virtue  be  too  high  a  name,  of  our  well-doing  ; 
and  above  all,  if  we  could  give  form  and  body  to  all  the  effects 
produced  on  the  principles  and  dispositions  of  nations  by  the  in 
fectious  feelings  of  insecurity,  and  the  soul-sickening  sense  of  un 
steadiness  in  the  whole  edifice  of  civil  society  ;  the  horrors  of  bat 
tle,  though  the  miseries  of  a  whole  war  were  brought  together 
before  our  eyes  in  one  disastrous  field,  would  present  but  a  tame 
tragedy  in  comparison.  Nay  it  would  even  present  a  sight  of 
comfort  and  of  elevation,  if  this  field  of  carriage  were  the  sign 
and  result  of  a  national  resolve,  of  a  general  will,  so  to  die,  that 
neither  deluge  nor  fire  should  take  away  the  name  of  country 
from  their  graves,  rather  than  to  tread  the  same  clods  of  earth, 
no  longer  a  country^  and  themselves  alive  in  nature,  but  dead  in 
infamy.  What  is  Greece  at  this  present  moment  ?  It  is  the 
country  of  the  heroes  from  Codrus  to  Philoprcmen  ;  and  so  it 
would  be,  though  all  the  sands  of  Africa  should  cover  its  corn 
fields  and  olive-gardens,  and  not  a  flower  were  left  on  Hymettus 
for  a  bee  to  murmur  in. 

If  then  the  power  with  which  wickedness  can  invest  the'  hu 
man  being  be  thus  tremendous,  greatly  does  it  behoove  us  to  in 
quire  into  its  source  and  causes.  So  doing  we  shall  quickly  dis 
cover  that  it  is  not  vice,  as  vice,  which  is  thus  mighty  I  but  sys 
tematic  vice.  Vice  self-consistent  and  entire  ;  crime  correspond 
ing  to  crime  ;  villany  entrenched  and  barricadoed  by  villany  ; 
this  is  the  condition  and  main  constituent  of  its  power.  The 
abandonment  of  all  principle  of  right  enables  the  soul  to  choose 
and  act  upon  a  principle  of  wrong,  and  to  subordinate  to  this  one 
principle  all  the  various  vices  of  human  nature.  For  it  is  a 
mournful  truth,  that  as  devastation  is  incomparably  an  easier 
work  than  production,  so  may  all  its  means  arid  instruments  be 
more  easily  arranged  into  a  scheme  and  system :  even  as  in  a 


114  THE    FBIEND. 

siege  every  building  and  garden,  which  the  faithful  governor 
must  destroy,  as  impeding  the  defensive  means  of  the  garrison, 
or  furnishing  means  of  offence  to  the  besieger,  occasions  a  wound 
in  feelings  which  virtue  herself  has  fostered  :  arid  virtue,  because 
it  is  virtue,  loses  perforce  part  of  her  energy  in  the  reluctance 
with  which  she  proceeds  to  a  business  so  repugnant  to  her  wishes, 
as  a  choice  of  evils.  But  he,  who  has  once  said  with  his  whole 
heart,  Evil,  be  thou  my  good  !  has  removed  a  world  of  obstacles 
by  the  very  decision,  that  he  will  have  no  obstacles  but  those  of 
force  and  brute  matter.  The  road  of  justice 

Curves  round  the  corn-field  and  the  hill  of  vines, 
Honoring  the  holy  bounds  of  property  ; — * 

but  the  path  of  the  lightning  is  straight ;  and  straight  the  fearful 
path 

Of  the  cannon-ball.     Direct  it  flies  and  rapid, 

Shatt'ring  that  it  may  reach,  and  shatt'ring  what  it  reaches.f 

Happily  for  mankind,  however,  the  obstacles  which  a  consistently 
evil  mind  no  longer  finds  in  itself,  it  finds  in  its  own  unsuitable- 
ness  to  human  nature.  A  limit  is  fixed  to  its  power  :  but  within 
that  limit,  both  as  to  the  extent  and  duration  of  its  influence, 
there  is  little  hope  of  checking  its  career,  if  giant  and  united 
vices  are  opposed  only  by  mixed  and  scattered  virtues  ;  and  those 
too,  probably,  from  the  want  of  some  combining  principle,  which 
assigns  to  each  its  due  place  and  rank,  at  civil  war  with  them 
selves,  or  at  best  perplexing  and  counteracting  each  other.  In 
our  late  agony  of  glory  and  of  peril,  did  we  not  too  often  hear 
even  good  men  declaiming  on  the  horrors  and  crimes  of  war,  and 
softening  or  staggering  the  minds  of  their  brethren  by  details  of 
individual  wretchedness  ?  Thus  under  pretence  of  avoiding 
blood,  they  were  withdrawing  the  will  from  the  defence  of  the 
very  source  of  those  blessings  without  which  the  blood  would  flow 
idly  in  our  veins  !  Thus  lest  a  few  should  fall  on  the  bulwarks 
in  glory,  they  were  preparing  us  to  give  up  the  whole  state  to 
baseness,  and  the  children  of  free  ancestors  to  become  slaves,  and 
the  fathers  of  slaves  ! 

Machiavelli  has  well  observed,  Sono  cli  ire  generazioni  cer- 
velli  :  Vuno  intende  per  se  ;  Valtro  intcnde  quanta  da  altri  gli  e 

*  Poetical  Works,  VII.  p.  480.— 2itf.  f  Ibid.  p.  480.—^. 


ESSAY    XVI.  115 

mostro  ;  e  il  terzo  non  intende  neper  se  stesso,  ne  per  dimostra- 
zione  di  altri*  "  There  are  brains  of  three  races.  The  one  un 
derstands  of  itself;  the  second  understands  as*  much  as  is  shown 
it  by  others  ;  the  third  neither  understands  of  itself  nor  what  is 
shown  it  by  others."!  I  should  have  no  hesitation  in  placing 
that  man  in  the  third  class  of  brains,  for  whom  the  history  of 
the  last  twenty  years  has  not  supplied  a  copious  comment  on  the 
preceding  text.  The  widest  maxims  of  prudence  are  like  arms 
without  hearts,  disjoined  from  those  feelings  which  flow  forth  from 
principle  as  from  a  fountain.  So  little  are  even  the  genuine 
maxims  of  expedience  likely  to  be  perceived  or  acted  upon  by 
those  who  have  been  habituated  to  admit  nothing  higher  than 
expedience,  that  I  dare  hazard  the  assertion,  that  in  the  whole 
chapter  of  contents  of  European  ruin,  eveiy  article  might  be  un 
answerably  deduced  from  the  neglect  of  some  maxim  which  has 
been  repeatedly  laid  down,  demonstrated,  and  enforced  with  a 
host  of  illustrations,  in  some  one  or  other  of  the  works  of  Ma- 
chiavelli,  Bacon,  or  Harrington.  Indeed  I  can  remember  no  one 
event  of  importance  which  was  not  distinctly  foretold,  and  this 
not  by  a  lucky  prize  drawn  among  a  thousand  blanks  out  of  the 
lottery  wheel  of  conjecture,  but  legitimately  deduced  as  certain 
consequences  from  established  premises.  It  would  be  a  melan 
choly,  but  a  very  profitable  employment,  for  some  vigorous  mind, 
intimately  acquainted  with  the  recent  history  of  Europe,  to  col 
lect  the  weightiest  aphorisms  of  Machiavelli  alone,  and  illustrat 
ing  by  appropriate  facts  the  breach  or  observation  of  each,  to 
render  less  mysterious  the  present  triumph  of  lawless  violence. 
The  apt  motto  to  su  cha  work  would  be, —  The  children  of  dark 
ness  are  wiser  in  their  generation  than  the  children  of  light. 

So  grievously,  indeed,  have  men  been  deceived  by  the  showy 
theories  of  unlearned  mock  thinkers,  that  there  seems  a  tendency 
in  the  public  mind  to  shun  all  thought,  and  to  expect  help  from 

*  11  Principe,  c.  xxii. — Ed. 

f  Ovrof  fjtev  7ravdpiGTO£,  of  avrti  Trdvra  voijari, 

Qpaavu/Lievoc  TO,  K'  eireiTa  nal  If  re/lof  ijoiv  d/j,£ivu' 

'E<70?,of  6'  av  /cu/ceivof,  6f  ev  EITTOVTI  Tridrjrai. 

rOf  <5e  KE  fj.Tjr'  avrdf  voi rj,  JUTJT'  u/lAou  UKOVW 

Ev  dvfj.u>  (3d?*A7]Tai,  u  6'  O.VT'  dxpr'jioc  dvqp. 

Op.  et  Dies.  293,  <fcc. 
Cic,  p.  Clueut.  c.  31.    Lir.  xxii.  29.    Diog.  Laer.  vii.  1.  21. — Ed. 


116  THE    FRIEND. 

any  quarter  rather  than  from  seriousness  and  reflection  ;  as  if 
some  invisible  power  would  think  for  us,  when  we  gave  up  the 
pretence  of  thinking  for  ourselves.  But  in  the  first  place,  did 
those,  who  opposed  the  theories  of  innovators,  conduct  their  un- 
theoretic  opposition  with  more  wisdom,  or  to  a  happier  result  ? 
And  secondly,  are  societies  now  constructed  on  principles  so  few 
and  so  simple,  that  we  could,  if  even  we  wished  it,  act  as  it  were 
by  instinct,  like  our  distant  forefathers  in  the  infancy  of  states  ? 
Doubtless,  to  act  is  nobler  than  to  think  :  but  as  the  old  man 
doth  not  become  a  child  by  means  of  his  second  childishness,  as 
little  can  a  nation  exempt  itself  from  the  necessity  of  thinking 
,  which  has  once  learnt  to  think.  Miserable  was  the  delusion  of 
the  late  mad  realizer  of  mad  dreams,  in  his  belief  that  he  should 
ultimately  succeed  in  transforming  the  nations  of  Europe  into 
the  unreasoning  hordes  of  a  Babylonian  or  Tartar  empire,  or  even 
in  reducing  the  age  to  the  simplicity — so  desirable  for  tyrants — 
of  those  times,  when  the  sword  and  the  plough  were  the  sole 
implements  of  human  skill.  Those  are  epochs  in  the  history  of 
a  people,  which,  having  been,  can  never  more  recur.  Extirpate 
all  civilization  and  all  its  arts  by  the  sword,  trample  down  all 
ancient  institutions,  rights,  distinctions,  and  privileges,  drag  us 
backward  to  our  old  barbarism,  as  beasts  to  the  den  of  Cacus — 
deem  you  that  thus  you  could  recreate  the  unexamining  and 
boisterous  youth  of  the  world,  when  the  sole  questions  were — 
"  What  is  to  be  conquered  ?  and  who  is  the  most  famous  leader  ?" 
r  In  an  age  in  which  artificial  knowledge  is  received  almost  at 
the  birth,  intellect  and  thought  alone  can  be  our  upholder  and 
judge.  Let  the  importance  of  this  truth  procure  pardon  for  its 
repetition.  Only  by  means  of  seriousness,  and  meditation,  and 
the  free  infliction  of  censure  in  the  spirit  of  love,  can  the  true 
philanthropist  of  the  present  time,  curb-in  himself  and  his  contem 
poraries  ;  only  by  these  can  he  aid  in  preventing  the  evils  which 
threaten  us,  not  from  the  terrors  of  an  enemy  so  much  as  from 
our  own  fear  of,  and  aversion  to,  the  toils  of  reflection.  For  all 
must  now  be  taught  in  sport — science,  morality,  yea,  religion 
itself.  And  yet  few  now  sport  from  the  actual  impulse  of  a  be 
lieving  fancy  and  in  a  happy  delusion.  Of  the  most  influential 
class,  at  least,  of  our  literary  guides — the  anonymous  authors  of 
our  periodical  publications — the  most  part  assume  this  character 
from  cowardice  or  malice,  till  having  begun  with  studied  igno- 


ESSAY    XVI.  117 

ranee  and  a  premeditated  levity,  they  at  length  realize  the  lie, 
and  end  indeed  in  a  pitiable  destitution  of  all  intellectual  power. 

To  many  I  shall  appear  to  speak  insolently,  because  fhe  pub 
lic, — (for  that  is  the  phrase  which  has  succeeded  to  The  Town, 
of  the  wits  of  the  reign  of  Charles  II.) — the  public  is  at  present 
accustomed  to  find  itself  appealed  to  as  the  infallible  judge,  and 
each  reader  complimented  with  excellencies,  which,  if  he  really 
possessed,  to  what  purpose  is  he  a  reader,  unless,  perhaps,  to  re 
mind  himself  of  his  own  superiority  !  I  confess  that  I  think  very 
differently.  I  have  not  a  deeper  conviction  on  earth,  than  that 
the  principles  of  taste,  morals,  and  religion,  which  are  taught  in 
the  commonest  books  of  recent  composition,  are  false,  injurious, 
and  debasing.  If  these  sentiments  should  be  just,  the  conse 
quences  must  be  so  important,  that  every  wrell-educated  man, 
who  professes  them  in  sincerity,  deserves  a  patient  hearing.  He 
may  fairly  appeal  even  to  those  whose  persuasions  are  most  op 
posed  to  his  own,  in  the  wrords  of  the  philosopher  of  Nola  : — 
Ad  isthcec  qu&so  vos,  qualiacunque  primo  videantur  aspectu, 
adtendite,  ut  qui  vobis  forsan  insanire  videa?',  saltern  quibits 
insaniam  rationibus  cognoscatis.  What  I  feel  deeply,  freely 
will  I  utter.  Truth  is  not  detraction  ;  and  assuredly  we  do  not 
hate  him  to  whom  we  tell  the  truth.  But  with  whomsoever  we 
play  the  deceiver  and  flatterer,  him  at  the  bottom  we  despise. 
We  are,  indeed,  under  a  necessity  to  conceive  a  vileness  in  him, 
in  order  to  diminish  the  sense  of  the  wrong  we  have  committed, 
by  the  worthlessness  of  the  object. 

Through  no  excess  of  confidence  in  the  strength  of  my  talents, 
but  with  the  deepest  assurance  of  the  justice  of  my  cause,  I  bid 
defiance  to  all  the  flatterers  of  the  folly,  and  foolish  self-opinion 
of  the  half-instructed  many  ; — to  all  who  fill  the  air  with  festal 
explosions  arid  false  fires  sent  up  against  the  lightnings  of  heaven, 
in  order  that  the  people  may  neither  distinguish  the  warning 
flash  nor  hear  the  threatening  thunder  !  How  recently  did  we 
stand  alone  in  the  world  ?  And  though  the  one  storm  has 
blown  over,  another  may  even  now  be  gathering  :  or  haply  the 
hollow  murmur  of  the  earthquake  within  the  bowels  of  our  own 
commonweal  may  strike  a  direr  terror  than  ever  did  the  tempest 
of  foreign  wurfare.  Therefore,  though  the  first  quatrain  is  no 
longer  applicable,  yet  the  moral  truth  and  the  sublime  exhorta 
tion  of  the  following  sonnet  can  never  be  superannuated.  With 


118  THE    FRIEND. 

it  I  conclude  this  essay,  thanking  God  that  I  have  communed 
with,  honored,  and  loved  its  wise  and  high-minded  author.  To 
know 'that  such  men  are  among  us,  is  of  itself  an  antidote 
against  despondence : — 

Another  year  ! — another  deadly  blow ! 

Another  mighty  empire  overthrown  ! 

And  we  are  left,  or  shall  be  left,  alone ; 

The  last  that  dares  to  struggle  with  the  foe. 

"Tis  well !  from  this  day  forward  we  shall  know 

That  in  ourselves  our  safety  must  be  sought ; 

That  by  our  own  right  hands  it  must  be  wrought ; 

That  we  must  stand  unpropt  or  be  laid  low. 

O  dastard  !  whom  such  foretaste  doth  not  cheer ! 

We  shall  exult,  if  they,  who  rule  the  land, 

Be  men  who  hold  its  many  blessings  dear, 

Wise,  upright,  valiant ;  not  a  venal  band, 

Who  are  to  judge  of  danger  which  they  fear, 

Aud  honor,  which  they  do  not  understand.         WORDSWORTH. 


THE  LANDING-PLACE: 


OR  ESSAYS   INTERPOSED   FOR  AMUSEMENT,   RETROSPECT, 
AND   PREPARATION. 


MISCELLANY    THE    FIRST. 


Jttiam  a  Musis  si  quando  animum  ' paulisper  abducamus,  apud  Musas 
nihilominus  feriamur :  at  reclines  qnidi'in,  at  otiosas,  at  dc  hi-s  ct  iilis  infer 
se  libcrc  colloquentcs. 


THE   LANDING-PLACE, 


ESSAY  I. 

O  blessed  letters  !  that  combine  in  one 
All  ages  past,  and  make  one  live  -with  all : 
By  you  we  do  confer  with  who  are  gone, 
And  the  dead-living  unto  council  call ! 
By  you  the  unborn  shall  have  communioii 
Of  what  we  feel  and  what  doth  us  befall. 

Since  writings  are  the  veins,  the  arteries, 
And  undecaying  life-strings  of  those  hearts, 
That  still  shall  pant  and  still  shall  exercise 
Their  mightiest  powers  when  nature  none  imparts : 
And  the  strong  constitution  of  their  praise 
Wear  out  the  infection  of  distempcr'd  days. 

DANIEL'S  MUSOPHILUS. 

THE  intelligence,  which  produces  or  controls  human  actions 
and  occurrences,  is  often  represented  by  the  Mystics  under  the 
name  and  notion  of  the  supreme  harmonist.  I  do  not  myself  ap 
prove  of  these  metaphors :  they  seem  to  imply  a  restlessness  to 
understand  that  which  is  not  among  the  appointed  objects  of  our 
comprehension  or  discursive  faculty.  But  certainly  there  is  one 
excellence  in  good  music,  to  which,  without  mysticism,  we  may 
find  or  make  an  analogy  in  the  records  of  history.  I  allude  to 
that  sense  of  recognition,  which  accompanies  our  sense  of  novelty 
in  the  most  original  passages  of  a  great  composer.  If  we  lis 
ten  to  a  symphony  of  Cimarosa,  the  present  strain  still  seems  not 
only  to  recall,  but  almost  to  renew,  some  past  movement,  another 
and  yet  the  same  !  Each  present  movement  bringing  back  as  it 
Avere,  and  embodying  the  spirit  of  some  melody  that  had  gone 
before,  anticipates  and  seems  trying  to  overtake  something  that 
is  to  come  :  and  the  musician  has  reached  the  summit  of  his  art, 

VOL.  ii.  F 


122  THE    LANDING-PLACE. 

when  having  thus  modified  the  present  by  the  past,  he  at  the 
same  time  weds  the  past  in  the  present  to  some  prepared  and 
corresponsive  future.  The  auditor's  thoughts  and  feelings  move 
under  the  same  influence  :  retrospection  blends  with  anticipation, 
and  hope  and  memory,  a  female  Janus,  become  one  power  with 
a  double  aspect.  A  similar  effect  the  reader  may  produce  for 
himself  in  the  pages  of  history,  if  he  will  be  content  to  substitute 
an  intellectual  complacency  for  pleasurable  sensation.  The  events 
and  characters  of  one  age,  like  the  strains  in  music,  recall  those 
of  another,  and  the  variety  by  which  each  is  individualized,  not 
only  gives  a  charm  and  poignancy  to  the  resemblance,  but  like 
wise  renders  the  whole  more  intelligible.  Meantime  ample 
room  is  afforded  for  the  exercise  both  of  the  judgment  and  the 
fancy,  in  distinguishing  cases  of  real  resemblance  from  those  of 
intentional  imitation,  the  analogies  of  nature,  revolving  upon  her 
self,  from  the  masquerade  figures  of  cunning  and  vanity. 

It  is  not  from  identity  of  opinions,  or  from  similarity  of  events 
and  outward  actions,  that  a  real  resemblance  in  the  radical 
character  can  be  deduced.  On  the  contrary,  men  of  great  and 
stirring  powers,  who  are  destined  to  mould  the  age  in  which  they 
are  born,  must  first  mould  themselves  upon  it.  Mohammed  born 
twelve  centuries  later,  and  in  the  heart  of  Europe,  would  not 
have  been  a  false  prophet ;  nor  would  a  false  prophet  of  the  pres 
ent  generation  have  been  a  Mohammed  in  the  seventh  century. 
I  have  myself,  therefore,  derived  the  deepest  interest  from  the 
comparison  of  men,  whose  characters  at  first  view  appear  widely 
dissimilar,  who  yet  have  produced  similar  effects  on  their  differ 
ent  ages,  and  this  by  the  exertion  of  powers  which  on  examina 
tion  will  be  found  far  more  alike,  than  the  altered  drapery  and 
costume  would  have  led  us  to  suspect.  Of  the  heirs  of  fame  few 
are  more  respected  by  me,  though  for  very  different  qualities,  than 
Erasmus  and  Luther  ;  scarcely  any  one  has  a  larger  share  of  my 
aversion  than  Voltaire  ;  and  even  of  the  better-hearted  Rousseau 
I  was  never  more  than  a  very  lukewarm  admirer.  I  should  per 
haps  too  rudely  affront  the  general  opinion,  if  I  avowed  my  whole 
creed  concerning  the  proportions  of  real  talent  between  the  two 
purifiers  of  revealed  religion,  now  neglected  as  obsolete,  and  the 
two  modern  conspirators  against  its  authority,  who  are  still  the 
Alpha  and  Ornega  of  continental  genius.  Yet  when  I  abstract 
the  questions  of  evil  and  good,  and  measure  only  the  effects  pro- 


ESSAY    I.  123 

duced  and  the  mode  of  producing  them,  I  have  repeatedly  found 
the  names  of  Voltaire,  Rousseau,  and  Robespierre,  recall  in  a 
similar  cluster  and  connection  those  of  Erasmus,  Luther,  and 
Muncer. 

Those  who  are  familiar  with  the  works  of  Erasmus,  arid  who 
know  the  influence  of  his  wit,  as  the  pioileer  of  the  Reformation ; 
and  who  likewise  know,  that  by  his  wit,  added  to  the  vast  variety 
of  knowledge  communicated  in  his  works,  he  had  won  over  by 
anticipation  so  large  a  part  of  the  polite  and  lettered  world  to  the 
Protestant  party  ;  will  be  at  no  loss  in  discovering  the  intended 
counterpart  in  the  life  and  writings  of  the  veteran  Frenchman. 
They  will  see,  indeed,  that  the  knowledge  of  the  one  was  solid 
through  its  whole  extent,  and  that  of  the  other  extensive  at  a 
cheap  rate,  by  its  superficiality  ;  that  the  wit  of  the  one  is  always 
bottomed  on  sound  sense,  peoples  and  enriches  the  mind  of  the 
reader  with  an  endless  variety  of  distinct  images  and  living  in 
terests  ;  and  that  his  broadest  laughter  is  everywhere  translatable 
into  grave  and  weighty  truth  :  while  the  wit  of  the  Frenchman, 
without  imagery,  without  character,  and  without  that  pathos 
which  gives  the  magic  charm  to  genuine  humor,  consists,  when 
it  is  most  perfect,  in  happy  turns  of  phrase,  but  far  too  often  in 
fantastic  incidents,  outrages  of  the  pure  imagination,  and  the  poor 
low  trick  of  combining  the  ridiculous  with  the  venerable,  where 
he,  who  does  not  laugh,  abhors.  Neither  will  they  have  forgotten 
that  the  object  of  the  one  was  to  drive  the  thieves  and  mummers 
out  of  the  temple,  while  the  other  was  propelling  a  worse  ban 
ditti,  first  to  profane  and  pillage,  and  ultimately  to  raze  it.  Yet 
not  the  less  will  they  perceive,  that  the  effects  remain  parallel, 
the  circumstances  analogous,  and  the  instruments  the  same.  In 
each  case  the  effects  extended  over  Europe,  were  attested  and 
augmented  by  the  praise  and  patronage  of  thrones  and  dignities, 
and  are  not  to  be  explained  but  by  extraordinary  industry  and  a 
life  of  literature  ;  in  both  instances  the  circumstances  were  sup 
plied  by  an  age  of  hopes  and  promises — the  age  of  Erasmus  rest 
less  from  the  first  vernal  influences  of  real  knowledge,  that  of 
Voltaire  from  the  hectic  of  imagined  superiority.  In  the  volumi 
nous  works  of  both,  the  instruments  employed  are  chiefly  those 
of  wit  and  amusing  erudition,  and  alike  in  both  the  errors  and 
evils,  real  or  imputed,  in  religion  and  politics  are  the  objects  of 
the  battery.  And  here  we  must  stop.  The  two  men  were  es- 


124  THE    LANDING-PLACE. 

sentially  different.  Exchange  mutually  their  dates  and  spheres 
of  action,  yet  Voltaire,  had  he  been  ten-fold  a  Voltaire,  could  not 
have  made  up  an  Erasmus  ;  and  Erasmus  must  have  emptied 
himself  of  half  his  greatness  and  all  his  goodness,  to  have  become 
a  Voltaire. 

Shall  I  succeed  betted  or  worse  with  the  next  pair,  in  this  our 
viiew  dance  of  death,  or  rather  of  the  shadows  which  I  have 
brought  forth — two  by  two — from  the  historic  ark  ?  ,  In  our  first 
couple  I  have  at  least  secured  an  honorable  retreat,  and  though 
I  failed  as  to  the  agents,  I  have  maintained  a  fair  analogy  in  the 
actions  and  the  objects.  But  the  heroic  Luther,  a  giant  awaking 
in  his  strength,  and  the  crazy  Rousseau,  the  dreamer  of  love-sick 
tales,  and  the  spinner  of  speculative  cobwebs  ;  shy  of  light  as  the 
mole,  but  as  quick-eared  too  for  every  whisper  of  the  public  opin 
ion  ;  the  teacher  of  stoic  pride  in  his  principles,  yet  the  victim 
of  morbid  vanity  in  his  feelings  and  conduct !  From  what  point 
of  likeness  can  we  commence  the  comparison  between  a  Luther 
and  a  Rousseau  ?  And  truly  had  I  been  seeking  for  characters 
that,  taken  as  they  really  existed,  closely  resemble  each  other, 
and  this,  too,  to  our  first  apprehensions,  and  according  to  the 
common  rules  of  biographical  comparison,  I  could  scarcely  have 
made  a  more  unlucky  choice  :  unless  I  had  desired  that  my  par 
allel  of  the  G  erman  son  of  thunder  and  the  visionary  of  Geneva, 
should  sit  on  the  same  bench  with  honest  Fluellen's  of  Alexander 
the  Great  arid  Harry  of  Monmouth.  Still,  however,  the  same 
analogy  would  hold  as  in  my  former  instance  :  the  effect  pro 
duced  on  their  several  ages  by  Luther  and  Rousseau,  were  com 
mensurate  with  each  other,  and  were  produced  in  both  cases  by 
what  their  contemporaries  felt  as  serious  and  vehement  eloquence, 
and  an  elevated  tone  of  moral  feeling  :  and  Luther,  not  less  than 
Rousseau,  was  actuated  by  an  almost  superstitious  hatred  of  su 
perstition,  and  a  turbulent  prejudice  against  prejudices.  In  the 
relation  too  which  their  writings  severally  bore  to  those  of  Eras 
mus  and  Voltaire,  and  the  way  in  which  the  latter  co-operated 
with  them  to  the  same  general  end,  each  finding  its  own  class  of 
admirers  and  proselytes,  the  parallel  is  complete. 

I  can  not,  however,  rest  here.  Spite  of  the  apparent  incongru 
ities,  I  am  disposed  to  plead  for  a  resemblance  in  the  men  them 
selves,  for  that  similarity  in  their  radical  natures,  which  I  aban 
doned  all  pretence  and  desire  of  showing  in  the  instances  of  Vol- 


ESSAY    I.  125 

taire  and  Erasmus.  But  then  my  readers  must  think  of  Luther 
not  as  he  really  was,  but  as  he  might  have  been,  if  he  had  been 
bom  in  the  age  and  under  the  circumstances  of  the  Swiss  philoso 
pher.  For  this  purpose  I  must  strip  him  of  many  advantages 
which  he  derived  from  his  own  times,  and  must  contemplate  him 
in  his  natural  weaknesses  as  well  as  in  his  original  strength. 
Each  referred  all  things  to  his  own  ideal.  The  ideal  was  indeed 
widely  different  in  the  one  and  in  the  other  :  and  this  was  not 
the  least  of  Luther's  many  advantages,  or,  to  use  a  favorite 
phrase  of  his  own,  not  one  of  his  least  favors  of  preventing  grace. 
Happily  ibr  him  he  had  derived  his  standard  from  a  common 
measure  already  received  by  the  good  and  wise  ;  I  mean  the  in 
spired  writings,  the  study  of  which  Erasmus  had  previously 
restored  among  the  learned.  To  know  that  we  are  in  sympathy 
with  others,  moderates  our  feelings  as  well  as  strengthens  our 
convictions  :  and  for  the  mind,  which  opposes  itself  to  the  faith 
of  the  multitude,  it  is  more  especially  desirable,  that  there  should 
exist  an  object  out  of  itself,  on  wilich  it  may  fix  its  attention,  and 
thus  balance  its  own  energies. 

Rousseau,  on  the  contrary,  in  the  inauspicious  spirit  of  his  age 
and  birth-place,^  had  slipped  the  cable  of  his  faith,  and  steered 
by  the  compass  of  unaided  reason,  ignorant  of  the  hidden  currents 
that  were  bearing  him  out  of  his  course,  and  too  proud  to  consult 
the  faithful  charts  prized  and  held  sacred  by  his  forefathers.  But 
the  strange  influences  of  his  bodily  temperament  on  his  under 
standing  ;  his  constitutional  melancholy  pampered  into  a  morbid 
excess  by  solitude  ;  his  wild  dreams  of  suspicion ;  his  hypochon- 
driacal  fancies  of  hosts  of  conspirators  all  leagued  against  him  and 
his  cause,  and  headed  by  some  arch-enemy,  to  whose  machina 
tions  he  attributed  every  trifling  mishap — all  as  much  the  crea 
tures  of  his  imagination,  as  if  instead  of  men  he  had  conceived 
them  to  be  infernal  spirits  and  beings  preternatural — these,  or  at 
least  the  predisposition  to  them,  existed  in  the  ground- work  of  his 
nature  :  they  were  parts  of  Rousseau  himself.  And  what  corres- 

*  Infidelity  was  so  common  in  Geneva  about  that  time,  that  Voltaire  in 
one  of  his  letters  exults,  that  in  this,  Calvin's  own  city,  some  half-dozen  only 
of  the  most  ignorant  believed  in  Christianity  under  any  form.  This  was, 
no  doubt,  one  of  Voltaire's  usual  lies  of  exaggeration  :  it  is  not,  however,  to 
be  denied,  that  here,  and  throughout  Switzerland,  he  and  the  dark  master 
in  whose  service  he  employed  himself,  had  ample  grounds  of  triumph. 


126  THE    LANDING-PLACE. 

ponding  in  kind  to  these,  not  to  speak  of  degree,  can  we  detect  in 
the  character  of  his  supposed  parallel  ?  This  difficulty  will  sug 
gest  itself  at  the  first  thought,  to  those  who  derive  all  their 
knowledge  of  Luther  from  the  meagre  biography  met  with  in  the 
Lives  of  eminent  Reformers,  or  even  from  the  ecclesiastical  his 
tories  of  Mosheim  or  Milner  :  for  a  life  of  Luther,  in  extent  and 
style  of  execution  proportioned  to  the  grandeur  and  interest  of  the 
subject,  a  life  of  the  man  Luther,  as  well  as  of  Luther  the  theolo 
gian,  is  still  a  desi deration  in  English  literature,  though  perhaps 
there  is  no  subject  for  which  so  many  unused  materials  are  ex 
tant,  both  printed  and  in  manuscript.^ 


ESSAY    II. 


Is  it,  I  ask,  most  important  to  the  best  interests  of  mankind,  temporal  as 
well  as  spiritual,  that  certain  works,  the  names  and  number  of  which  are 
fixed  and  unalterable,  should  be  distinguished  from  all  other  works,  not  in 
degree  only  but  even  in  kind  ?•{•  And  that  these,  collectively,  should  form 
THE  BOOK,  to  which  in  all  the  concerns  of  faith  and  morality  the  last  re 
course  is  to  be  had,  and  from  the  admitted  decisions  of  which  no  man  dare 


*  The  affectionate  respect  in  which  I  hold  the  name  of  Dr.  Jortin — one 
of  the  many  illustrious  nurslings  of  the  college  to  which  I  deem  it  no  small 
honor  to  have  belonged — Jesus,  Cambridge — renders  it  painful  to  me  to  as 
sert,  that  the  above  remark  holds  almost  equally  true  of  a  life  of  Erasmus. 
But  every  scholar  well  read  in  the  writings  of  Erasmus  and  his  illustrious 
contemporaries,  must  have  discovered,  that  Jortin  had  neither  collected 
sufficient,  nor  the  best,  materials  for  his  work :  and — perhaps  from  that 
very  cause — he  grew  weary  of  his  task,  before  he  had  made  a  full  use  of 
the  scanty  materials  which  he  had  collected. 

f  This  is  one  of  the  hinges  on  which  the  gate  of  egress  from  the  spiritual 
Rome  turns.  Historically,  the  affirmative  to  the  question  has  been  the  con 
stant  and  close  companion  of  Protestantism : — but  whether  it  be  likewise 
its  indispensable  support,  remains  yet  to  be  discussed,  at  the  tribunal  of 
sound  philosophy.  Hitherto  both  the  ay  and  the  no  have  been,  as  it  ap 
pears  to  me,  but  very  weakly  and  superficially  argued.  But  I  confess  that 
Chill ingworth  makes  me  half  a  Roman  Catholic  on  this  point ;  lest  in  ac 
ceding  to  the  grounds  of  his  arguments  against  the  Romanists,  I  should  be 
come  less  than  half  a  Christian,  and  lose  the  substantive  in  my  earnestness 
to  tear  off  its  parasitical  and  suffocating  epithet : — that  is,  cease  to  be  a 
Catholic  in  aversion  to  the  Papal  bull  of  Roman  Catholic.  1830. 


ESSAY    II.  127 

appeal? — If  tbe  mere  existence  of  a  book  so  called  and  charactered  be,  as 
the  Koran  itself  suffices  to  evince,  a  mighty  bond  of  union,  among  nations 
whom  all  other  causes  tend  to  separate ;  if  moreover  the  book  revered  by 
us  and  our  forefathers  has  been  the  foster-nurse  of  learning  in  the  darkest, 
and  of  civilization  in  the  rudest,  times ;  and  lastly,  if  this  so  vast  and  wide 
a  blessing  is  not  to  be  founded  in  a  delusion,  and  doomed  therefore  to  the 
impermanence  and  scorn  in  which  sooner  or  later  all  delusions  must  end ; 
how,  I  pray  you,  is  it  conceivable  that  this  should  be  brought  about  and 
secured,  otherwise  than  by  God's  special  vouchsafement  to  this  one  book, 
exclusively,  of  that  divine  MEAN,  that  uniform  and  perfect  middle  way, 
which  in  all  points  is  at  safe  and  equal  distance  from  all  errors  whether  of 
excess  or  defect  ?  But  again,  if  this  be  true — and  what  Protestant  Chris 
tian  worthy  of  his  baptismal  dedication  will  deny  its  truth? — if  in  the  one 
book  we  are  entitled,  or  even  permitted,  to  expect  the  golden  mean  through 
out  : — surely  we  ought  not  to  be  hard  and  over-stern  in  our  censures  of  the 
mistakes  arid  infirmities  of  those,  who  pretending  to  no  warrant  of  extraor 
dinary  inspiration  have  yet  been  raised  up  by  God's  providence  to  be  of 
highest  power  and  eminence  in  the  reformation  of  his  Church.  Far  rather 
does  it  behoove  us  to  consider,  in  how  many  instances  the  peccant  humor 
native  to  the  man  had  been  wrought  upon  by  the  faithful  study  of  that 
only  faultless  model,  and  corrected  into  an  unsinning,  or  at  least  a  venial, 
predominance  in  the  writer  or  preacher.  Yea,  that  not  seldom  the  infir 
mity  of  a  zealous  soldier  in  the  warfare  of  Christ  has  been  made  the  very 
mould  and  ground-work  of  that  man's  peculiar  gifts  and  virtues.  Grateful 
too  we  should  be,  that  the  very  faults  of  famous  men  have  been  fitted  to 
the  age,  on  which  they  were  to  act :  and  that  thus  the  folly  of  man  has 
proved  the  wisdom  of  God,  and  been  made  the  instrument  of  his  mercy  to 
mankind. 

WHOEVER  has  sojourned  in  Eisenach,  will  assuredly  have  vis 
ited  the  Warteburg,  interesting  by  so  many  historical  associations, 
which  stands  on  a  high  rock,  about  two  miles  to  the  south  from 
the  city  gate.  To  this  castle  Luther  was  taken  on  his  return 
from  the  imperial  Diet,  where  Charles  V.  had  pronounced  the 
ban  upon  him,  and  limited  his  safe  convoy  to  one  and  twenty 
days.  On  the  last  but  one  of  these  days,  as  he  was  on  his  way 
to  Waltershausen,  a  town  in  the  duchy  of  Saxe  Gotha,  a  few 
leagues  to  the  south-east  of  Eisenach,  he  was  stopped  in  a  hol 
low  behind  the  castle  Altenstein,  and  carried  to  the  Warteburg. 
The  Elector  of  Saxony,  who  could  not  have  refused  to  deliver  up 
Luther,  as  one  put  in  the  ban  by  the  Emperor  and  the  Diet,  had 
ordered  John  of  Berleptsch,  the  governor  of  the  Warteburg,  and 
Burckhardt  von  Hundt,  the  governor  of  Altenstein,  to  take  Lu 
ther  to  one  or  the  other  of  these  castles,  without  acquainting*  him 
which  ;  in  order  that  he  might  be  able,  with  safe  conscience,  to 


128  THE    LANDING-PLACE. 

declare,  that  he  did  not  know  where  Luther  was.  Accordingly 
they  took  him  to  the  Warteburg,  under  the  name  of  the  Cheva 
lier  (Ritter)  George. 

To  this  friendly  imprisonment  the  Reformation  owes  many  of 
Luther's  most  important  labors.  In  this  place  he  wrote  his  works 
against  auricular  confession,  against  Jacob  Latronum,  the  tract 
on  the  abuses  of  masses,  that  against  clerical  and  monastic  vows, 
composed  his  exposition  of  the  22,  27,  and  68  Psalms,  finished 
his  declaration  of  the  Magnificat,  began  to  write  his  Church 
Iromilies,  and  translated  the  New  Testament.  Here  too,  and 
during  this  time,  he  is  said  to  have  hurled  his  inkstand  at  the 
devil,  the  black  spot  from  which  yet  remains  on  the  stone  wall 
of  the  room  he  studied  in  ;  which,  surely,  no  one  will  have  vis 
ited  the  Warteburg  without  having  had  pointed  out  to  him  by 
the  good  Catholic  who  is,  or  at  least  some  few  years  ago  was, 
the  warden  of  the  castle.  He  must  have  been  either  a  very  su 
percilious  or  a  very  incurious  traveller  if  he  did  not,  for  the  grati 
fication  of  his  guide  at  least,  inform  himself  by  means  of  his  pen 
knife,  that  the  said  marvellous  blot  bids  defiance  to  all  the  toils 
of  the  scrubbing  brush,  and  is  to  remain  a  sign  forever  ;  and  with 
this  advantage  over  most  of  its  kindred,  that  being  capable  of  a 
double  interpretation,  it  is  equally  flattering  to  the  Protestant 
and  the  Papist,  and  is  regarded  by  the  wonder-loving  zealots  of 
both  parties,  with  equal  faith. 

Whether  the  great  man  ever  did  throw  his  inkstand  at  his 
Satanic  Majesty,  whether  he  ever  boasted  of  the  exploit,  and  him 
self  declared  the  dark  blotch  on  his  study  wall  in  the  Warteburg, 
to  be  the  result  and  relict  of  this  author-like  hand-grenado, — 
(happily  for  mankind  he  used  his  inkstand  at  other  times  to  bet 
ter  purpose,  and  with  more  effective  hostility  against  the  arch 
fiend) — I  leave  to  my  reader's  own  judgment ;  on  condition,  how 
ever,  that  he  has  previously  perused  Luther's  Table  Talk,  and 
other  writings  of  the  same  stamp,  of  some  of  his  most  illustrious 
contemporaries,  which  contain  facts  still  more  strange  and  Avhim- 
sical,  related  by  themselves  and  of  themselves,  arid  accompanied 
with  solemn  protestations  of  the  truth  of  their  statements.  Lu 
ther's  Table  Talk,  which  to  a  truly  philosophic  mind,  will  not  be 
less  interesting  than  Rousseau's  Confessions,  I  have  not  myself 
the  means  of  consulting  at  present,  and  can  not  therefore  say, 
whether  this  ink-pot  adventure  is,  or  is  not,  told  or  referred  to,  in 


ESSAY    II.  129 

it  ;*  but  many  considerations  incline  me  to  give  credit  to  the 
story. 

Luther's  unremitting  literary  labor  and  his  sedentary  mode  of 
life,  during  his  confinement  in  the  Warteburg,  where  he  was 
treated  with  the  greatest  kindness,  and  enjoyed  every  liberty  con 
sistent  with  his  own  safety,  had  begun  to  undermine  his  former 
unusually  strong  health.  He  suffered  many  and  most  distressing 
effects  of  indigestion  and  a  deranged  state  of  the  digestive  organs. 
Melanethon,  whom  he  had  desired  to  consult  the  physicians  at 
Erfurth,  sent  him  some  de-obstruent  medicines,  and  the  advice  to 
take  regular  and  severe  exercise.  At  first  he  followed  the  ad 
vice,  sate  and  labored  less,  and  spent  whole  days  in  the  chase  ; 
but  like  the  younger  Pliny,  he  strove  in  vain  to  form  a  taste  for 
this  favorite  amusement  of  the  gods  of  the  earth,  as  appears  from 
a  passage  in  his  letter  to  George  Spalatin,  which  I  translate  for 
an  additional  reason  ; — to  prove  to  the  admirers  of  Rousseau,  who 
perhaps  will  not  be  less  affronted  by  this  biographical  parallel, 
than  the  zealous  Lutherians  will  be  offended,  that  if  my  compar 
ison  should  turn  out  groundless  on  the  whole,  the  failure  will  not 
have  arisen  either  from  the  want  of  sensibility  in  our  great  re 
former,  or  of  angry  aversion  to  those  in  high  places,  whom  he  re 
garded  as  the  oppressors  of  their  rightful  equals.  "  I  have  been," 
he  writes,  "  employed  for  two  days  in  the  sports  of  the  field,  arid 
was  willing  myself  to  taste  this  bitter-sweet  amusement  of  the 
great  heroes  :  we  have  caught  two  hares,  and  one  brace  of  poor 
little  partridges.  An  employment  this  which  does  not  ill  suit 
quiet  leisurely  folks  :  for  even  in  the  midst  of  the  ferrets  and 
dogs,  I  have  had  theological  fancies.  But  as  much  pleasure  as 
the  general  appearance  of  the  scene  and  the  mere  looking-on 
occasioned  me,  even  so  much  it  pitied  me  to  think  of  the  mys 
tery  and  emblem  which  lies  beneath  it.  For  what  does  this  sym 
bol  signify,  but  that  the  devil,  through  his  godless  huntsmen  and 
dogs,  the  bishops  and  theologians  to  wit,  doth  privily  chase  and 
catch  the  innocent  poor  little  beasts  ?  Ah  !  the  simple  and 
credulous  souls  came  thereby  far  too  plain  before  my  eyes. 
Thereto  comes  a  yet  more  frightful  mystery  :  as  at  my  earnest 
entreaty  we  had  saved  alive  one  poor  little  hare,  and  I  had  con 
cealed  it  in  the  sleeve  of  my  great  coat,  and  had  strolled  off  a 
short  distance  from  it,  the  dogs  in  the  mean  time  found  the  poor 
*  It  is  not.— Ed. 


130  THE    LANDING-PLACE. 

hare.  Such,  too,  is  the  fury  of  the  Pope  with  Satan,  that  he  de 
stroys  even  the  souls  that  had  been  saved,  and  troubles  himself 
little  about  my  pains  and  entreaties.  Of  such  hunting  then  I 
have  had  enough."  In  another  passage  he  tells  his  correspondent, 
"  You  know  it  is  hard  to  be  a  prince,  and  not  in  some  degree  a 
robber,  and  the  greater  a  prince  the  more  a  robber."  Of  our 
Henry  VIII.  he  says,  "  I  must  answer  the  grim  lion  that  passes 
himself  off' for  king  of  England.  The  ignorance  in  the  book  is 
such  as  one  naturally  expects  from  a  king  ;  but  the  bitterness  and 
impudent  falsehood  is  quite  leonine."  And  in  his  circular  letter 
to  the  princes,  on  occasion  of  the  peasants'  war,  he  uses  a  lan 
guage  so  inflammatory,  and  holds  ibrth  a  doctrine  which  borders 
so  near  on  the  holy  right  of  insurrection,  that  it  may  as  well  re 
main  untranslated. 

Had  Luther  been  himself  a  prince  he  could  not  have  desired 
better  treatment  than  he  received  during  his  eight  months'  stay 
in  the  Warteburg  ;  and  in  consequence  of  a  more  luxurious  diet 
than  he  had  been  accustomed  to,  he  was  plagued  with  tempta 
tions  both  from  the  flesh  and  the  devil.  It  is  evident  from  his 
letters*  that  he  suffered  under  great  irritability  of  his  nervous 
system,  the  common  effect  of  deranged  digestion  in  men  of  seden 
tary  habits,  who  are  at  the  same  time  intense  thinkers  ;  and  this 
irritability  added  to,  and  revivifying,  the  impressions  made  upon 
him  in  early  life,  and  fostered  by  the  theological  systems  of  his 
manhood,  is  abundantly  sufficient  to  explain  all  his  apparitions 
and  all  his  nightly  combats  with  evil  spirits.  I  see  nothing  im 
probable  in  the  supposition,  that  in  one  of  those  unconscious  half- 
sleeps,  or  rather  those  rapid  alternations  of  the  sleeping  with  the 
half-waking  state,  which  is  the  true  witching  time, 


-the  season 


Wherein  the  spirits  hold  their  wont  to  walk, 

the  fruitful  'matrix  of  ghosts — I  see  nothing  improbable,  that  in 
some  one  of  those  momentary  slumbers,  into  which  the  suspen- 

*  I  can  scarcely  conceive  a  more  delightful  volume  than  might  be  made 
from  Luther's  letters,  especially  from  those  that  were  written  from  the 
Warteburg,  if  they  were  translated  in  the  simple,  sinewy,  idiomatic,  hearty, 
mother-tongue  of  the  original.  A  difficult  task  I  admit — and  scarcely  pos 
sible  for  any  man,  however  great  his  talents  in  other  respects,  whose  favor 
ite  reading  has  not  lain  among  the  English  writers  from  Edward  VI.  to 
Charles  I. 


ESSAY    II.  181 

sion  of  all  thought  in  the  perplexity  of  intense  thinking  so  often 
passes,  Luther  should  have  had  a  full  view  of  the  room  in  which 
he  was  sitting,  of  his  writing-table  and  all  the  implements  of 
study,  as  they  really  existed,  and  at  the  same  time  a  brain-image 
of  the  devil,  vivid  enough  to  have  acquired  apparent  outness, 
and  a  distance  regulated  by  the  proportion  of  its  distinctness  to 
that  of  the  objects  really  impressed  on  the  outward  senses. 

If  this  Christian  Hercules,  this  heroic  cleanser  of  the  Augean 
stable  of  apostasy,  had  been  born  and  educated  in  the  present  or 
the  preceding  generation,  he  would,  doubtless,  have  holden  him 
self  for  a  man  of  genius  and  original  power.  But  with  this  faith 
alone,  he  would  scarcely  have  removed  tho  mountains  which  he 
did  remove.  The  darkness  and  superstition  of  the  age,  which 
required  such  a  reformer,  had  moulded  his  mind  for  the  reception 
of  impressions  concerning  himself,  better  suited  to  inspire  the 
strength  and  enthusiasm  necessary  for  the  task  of  reformation, 
impressions  more  in  sympathy  with  the  spirits  whom  he  was  to 
influence.  He  deemed  himself  gifted  with  supernatural  influxes, 
an  especial  servant  of  heaven,  a  chosen  warrior,  fighting  as  the 
general  of  a  small  but  faithful  troop,  against  an  army  of  evil 
beings,  headed  by  the  prince  of  the  air.  These  were  no  meta 
phorical  beings  in  his  apprehension.  He  was  a  poet  indeed,  as 
great  a  poet  as  ever  lived  in  any  age  or  country  ;  but  his  poetic 
images  were  so  vivid,  that  they  mastered  the  poet's  own  mind  ! 
He  was  possessed  with  them,  as  with  substances  distinct  from 
himself :  Luther  did  not  write,  he  acted  poems.  The  Bible  was 
a,  spiritual,  indeed,  but  not  a  figurative  armory  in  his  belief:  it 
was  the  magazine  of  his  warlike  stores,  and  from  thence  he  was 
to  arm  himself,  and  supply  both  shield  and  sword,  and  javelin, 
to  the  elect.  Methinks  1  see  him  sitting,  the  heroic  student,  in 
his  chamber  in  the  "Warteburg,  with  his  midnight  lamp  before 
him,  seen  by  the  late  traveller  in  the  distant  plain  of  Bischofs- 
roda,  as  a  star  on  the  mountain  !  Below  it  lies  the  Hebrew 
Bible  open,  on  which  he  gazes,  his  brow  pressing  on  his  palm, 
brooding  over  some  obscure  text,  which  he  desires  to  make  plain 
to  the  simple  boor  and  to  the  humble  artisan,  and  to  transfer  its 
whole  force  into  their  own  natural  and  living  tongue.  And  he 
himself  does  not  understand  it  !  Thick  darkness  lies  on  the  ori 
ginal  text  :  he  counts  the  letters,  he  calls  up  the  roots  of  each 
separate  word,  and  questions  them  as  the  familiar  spirits  of  au 


182  THE    LANDING-PLACE, 

oracle.  In  vain  ;  thick  darkness  continues  to  cover  it ,'  not  a  ray 
of  meaning  dawns  through  it.  With  sullen  and  angry  hope  he 
reaches  for  the  Vulgate,  his  old  and  sworn  enemy,  the  treacherous 
confederate  of  the  Roman  anti-Christ,  which  he  so  gladly,  when 
ho  can,  rebukes  for  idolatrous  falsehoods,  that  had  dared  place 

"Within  the  sanctuary  itself  their  shrines, 
Abominations  ! • — - • — • 

Now — 0  thought  of  humiliation — he  must  entreat  its  aid.  Beef 
there  has  the  sly  spirit  of  apostasy  worked-in  a  phrase,  which- 
favors  the  doctrine  of  purgatory,  the  intercession  of  saints,  or  the 
efficacy  of  prayers  for  the  dead  ;  and  what  is  worst  of  all,  the 
interpretation  is  plausible.  The  original  Hebrew  might  be  forced 
into  this  meaning  :  and  no  other  meaning  seems  to  lie  in  it,  none 
to  hover  above  it  in  the  heights  of  allegory,  none  to  lurk  beneath 
it  even  in  the  depths  of  cabala  !  This  is  the  work  of  the  tempter  "f 
it  is  a  cloud  of  darkness  conjured  up  between  the  truth  of  the 
sacred  letters  and  the  eyes  of  his  understanding,  by  the  malice 
of  the  evil  one,  and  for  a  trial  of  his  faith  !  Must  he  then  at 
length  confess,  must  he  subscribe  the  name  of  Luther  to  an  ex 
position  which  consecrates  a  weapon  for  the  hand  of  the  idola 
trous  hierarchy  ?  Never  !  never ! 

There  still  remains  one  auxiliary  in  reserve,  the  translation  of 
the  Seventy.  The  Alexandrine  Greeks,  anterior  to  the  Church 
itself,  could  intend  no  support  to  its  corruptions — the  Septnagint 
wrill  have  profaned  the  altar  of  truth  with  no  incense  for  the 
nostrils  of  the  universal  bishop  to  snuff  up.  And  here  again  his 
hopes  are  baffled  !  Exactly  at  this  perplexed  passage  had  the 
Greek  translator  given  his  understanding  a  holiday,  and  made 
his  pen  supply  its  place.  0  honored  Luther  !  as  easily  mightest 
thou  convert  the  whole  city  of  Rome,  with  the  Pope  and  the 
conclave  of  cardinals  inclusively,  as  strike  a  spark  of  light  from 
the  words,  and  nothing  but  words,  of  the  Alexandrine  version. 
Disappointed,  despondent,  enraged,  ceasing  to  think,  yet  continu 
ing  his  brain  on  the  stretch  in  solicitation  of  a  thought ;  and 
gradually  giving  himself  up  to  angry  fancies,  to  recollections  of 
past  persecutions,  to  uneasy  fears  and  inward  defiances  and  float 
ing  images  of  the  evil  being,  their  supposed  personal  author  ;  he 
sinks  without  perceiving  it,  into  a  trance  of  slumber  ;  during' 
which  his  brain  retains  ils  waking  energies,  excepting  that  what 


ESSAY    II,  138 

would  have  been  mere  thoughts  before,  now — the  action  and 
counterweight  of  his  senses  and  of  their  impressions  being  with 
drawn — shape  and  condense  themselves  into  things,  into  realities. 
Repeatedly  half-wakening,  and  his  eyelids  as  often  reclosing,  the 
objects  which  really  surround  him  form  the  place  and  scenery  of 
his  dream.  All  at  once  he  sees  the  arch-fiend  coming  forth  on 
the  wall  of  the  room,  from  the  very  spot,  perhaps,  on  which  his 
eyes  had  been  fixed  vacantly  during  the  perplexed  moments  of 
his  former  meditation  :  the  inkstand  which  he  had  at  the  same 
time  been  using,  becomes  associated  with  it:  and  in  that  struggle 
of  rage,  which  in  these  distempered  dreams  almost  constantly 
precedes  the  helpless  terror  by  the  pain  of  which  we  are  finally 
awakened,  he  imagines  that  he  hurls  it  at  the  intruder,  or  not 
improbably  in  the  first  instant  of  awakening,  while  yet  both  his 
imagination  and  his  eyes  are  possessed  by  the  dream,  he  actually 
hurls  it.  Some  weeks  after,  perhaps,  during  which  interval  he 
had  often  mused  on  the  incident,  undetermined  whether  to  deem 
it  a  visitation  of  Satan  to  him  in  the  body  or  out  of  the  body,  he 
discovers  for  the  first  time  the  dark  spot  on  his  wall,  and  receives 
it  as  a  sign  and  pledge  vouchsafed  to  him  of  the  event  having 
actually  taken  place. 

Such  was  Luther  under  the  influences  of  the  age  and  country 
in  and  for  which  he  was  born.  Conceive  him  a  citizen  of  Geneva, 
and  a  contemporary  of  Voltaire  :  suppose  the  French  language 
his  mother-tongue,  and  the  political  and  moral  philosophy  of 
English  free-thinkers  re-modelled  by  Parisians/or^  esprits,  to  have 
been  the  objects  of  his  study  ; — conceive  this  change  of  circum 
stances,  and  Luther  will  no  longer  dream  of  fiends  or  of  anti- 
Christ — but  will  he  have  no  dreams  in  their  place  ?  His  melan 
choly  will  have  changed  its  drapery  ;  but  will  it  find  no  new  cos 
tume  wherewith  to  clothe  itself  ?  His  impetuous  temperament, 
his  deep  working  mind,  his  busy  and  vivid  imaginations — would 
they  not  have  been  a  trouble  to  him  in  a  world,  where  nothing 
was  to  be  altered,  where  nothing  was  to  obey  his  power,  to  cease 
to  be  that  which  it  had  been,  in  order  to  realize  his  pre-concep- 
lions  of  what  it  ought  to  be  ?  His  sensibility,  which  found  ob 
jects  for  itself,  and  shadows  of  human  suffering  in  the  harmless 
brute,  and  even  in  the  flowers  which  he  trod  upon — might  it  not 
naturally,  in  an  unspiritualized  age,  have  wept,  and  trembled, 
and  dissolved,  over  scenes  of  earthly  passion,  and  the  struggles  of 


134:  THE    LANDING-PLACE. 

love  with  duty  ?  His  pity,  that  so  easily  passed  into  rage,  would 
it  not  have  found  in  the  inequalities  of  mankind,  in  the  oppres 
sions  of  governments  and  the  miseries  of  the  governed,  an  entire 
instead  of  a  divided  object  ?  And  might  not  a  perfect  constitu 
tion,  a  government  of  pure  reason,  a  renovation  of  the  social  con 
tract,  have  easily  supplied  the  place  of  the  reign  of  Christ  in  the 
new  Jerusalem,  of  the  restoration  of  the  visible  Church,  and  the 
union  of  all  men  by  one  faith  in  one  charity  ?  Henceforward 
then,  we  will  conceive  his  reason  employed  in  building  up  anew 
the  edifice  of  earthly  society,  and  his  imagination  as  pledging  it 
self  for  the  possible  realization  of  the  structure.  We  will  lose  the 
great  reformer,  who  was  born  in  an  age  which  needed  him,  in 
the  philosopher  of  Geneva,  who  was  doomed  to  misapply  his 
energies  to  materials  the  properties  of  which  he  misunderstood, 
and  happy  only  that  he  did  not  live  to  witness  the  direful  effects 
of  his  own  system. 


ESSAY   III. 

Pectora  cui  credam  ?  quis  me  lenire  docebit 

Mordaces  cnras,  quis  longas  fallere  nodes, 

Ex  quo  summa  dies  tulerit  Damona  sub  umbras  ? 

Omnia  pttulatim  consumit  longlor  atas, 
Vivendoque  simul  morimur,  rapimurque  mancndo. 

Ite  tamen,  lacrynifc  !  puruin  colis  cctltcra,  Damon  ! 
Nee  mi  hi  convcniunt  lacrymcc.     Non  omjiia  terras 
Obruta  I  vivit  amor,  vivit  dolor  !  ora  negatur 
Dulcia  conspicere :  ftcre  et  meminisse  relictum  est. 

MILTON  :  PETRARCH  :  MILTON. 

THE  two  following  essays  I  devote  to  elucidation,  the  first  of 
the  theory  of  Luther's  apparitions  stated  perhaps  too  briefly  in  the 
preceding  essay  ;  the  second  for  the  purpose  of  removing  the  only 
obstacle,  which  I  can  discover  in  the  next  section  of  The  Friend, 
to  the  reader's  ready  comprehension  of  the  principles,  on  which 
the  arguments  are  grounded.  First,  I  will  endeavor  to  make  my 
ghost  theory  more  clear  to  those  of  my  readers,  who  are  fortunate 


ESSAY    III.  135 

enough  to  find  it  obscure  in  consequence  of  their  own  good  health 
arid  unshattered  nerves.  The  window  of  my  library  at  Keswick 
is  opposite  to  the  fire-place,  and  looks  out  on  the  very  large  gar 
den  that  occupies  the  whole  slope  of  the  hill  on  which  the  house 
stands.  Consequently,  the  rays  of  light  transmitted  through  the 
glass,  that  is,  the  rays  from  the  garden,  the  opposite  mountains, 
and  the  bridge,  river,  lake,  and  vale  interjacent,  and  the  rays  re 
flected  from  it,  of  the  fire-place,  &c.,  enter  the  eye  at  the  same 
moment.  At  the  coming  on  of  evening,  it  was  my  frequent 
amusement  to  watch  the  image  or  reflection  of  the  fire,  that 
.seemed  burning  in  the  bushes  or  between  the  trees  in  different 
parts  of  the  garden  or  the  fields  beyond  it,  according  as  there  was 
more  or  less  light ;  and  which  still  arranged  itself  among  the  real 
objects  of  vision,  with  a  distance  and  magnitude  proportioned  to 
its  greater  or  lesser  faintness.  For  still  as  the  darkness  in 
creased,  the  image  of  the  fire  lessened  and  grew  nearer  and  more 
distinct ;  till  the  twilight  had  deepened  into  perfect  night,  when 
all  outward  objects  being  excluded,  the  window  became  a  perfect 
looking-glass  :  save  only  that  my  books  on  the  side  shelves  of  the 
room  were  lettered,  as  it  were,  on  their  backs  with  stars,  more  or 
fewer  as  the  sky  was  less  or  more  clouded,  the  rays  of  the  stars 
being  at  that  time  the  only  ones  transmitted.  Now  substitute 
the  phantom  from  Luther's  brain  for  the  images  of  reflected  light, 
the  fire  for  instance,  and  the  forms  of  his  room  and  its  furniture 
for  the  transmitted  rays,  and  you  have  a  fair  resemblance  of  an 
apparition,  and  a  just  conception  of  the  manner  in  which  it  is 
seen  together  with  real  objects.  I  have  long  wished  to  devote  an 
entire  work  to  the  subject  of  dreams,  visions,  ghosts,  and  witch 
craft,  in  which  I  might  first  give,  and  then  endeavor  to  explain, 
the  most  interesting  and  best  attested  fact  of  each,  which  has 
come  within  my  knowledge,  either  from  books  or  from  personal 
testimony.  I  might  then  explain  in  a  more  satisfactory  way  the 
mode  in  which  our  thoughts,  in  states  of  morbid  slumber,  become 
at  times  perfectly  dramatic, — for  in  certain  sorts  of  dreams  the 
dullest  weight  becomes  a  Shakspeare, — and  by  what  law  the 
form  of  the  vision  appears  to  talk  to  us  its  own  thoughts  in  a 
voice  as  audible  as  the  shape  is  visible  ;  and  this  too  oftentimes 
in  connected  trains,  and  not  seldom  even  with  a  concentration  of 
power  which  may  easily  impose  on  the  soundest  judgments,  un- 
instructed  in  the  optics  and  acoustics  of  the  inner  sense,  for  reve- 


136  THE    LANDING-PLACE. 

lations  and  gifts  of  prescience.  In  aid  of  the  present  case,  I  will 
only  remark,  that  it  would  appear  incredible  to  persons  not  ac 
customed  to  these  subtle  notices  of  self-observation,  what  small 
and  remote  resemblances,  what  mere  hints  of  likeness  from  some 
real  external  object,  especially  if  the  shape  be  aided  by  color,  will 
suffice  to  make  a  vivid  thought  consubstantiate  with  the  real  ob 
ject,  and  derive  from  it  an  outward  perceptibility.  Even  when 
we  are  broad  awake,  if  we  are  in  anxious  expectation,  how  often 
will  not  the  most  confused  sounds  of  nature  be  heard  by  us  as  ar 
ticulate  sounds  ?  For  instance,  the  babbling  of  a  brook  will  ap 
pear  for  a  moment  the  voice  of  a  friend,  for  whom  we  are  wait 
ing,  calling  out  our  own  names.  A  short  meditation,  therefore, 
on  the  great  law  of  the  imagination,  that  a  likeness  in  part  tends 
to  become  a  likeness  of  the  whole,  will  make  it  not  only  con 
ceivable  but  probable,  that  the  inkstand  itself,  and  the  dark- 
colored  stone  on  the  wall,  which  Luther  perhaps  had  never  till 
then  noticed,  might  have  a  considerable  influence  in  the  produc 
tion  of  the  fiend,  and  of  the  hostile  act  by  which  his  obtrusive 
visit  was  repelled. 

A  lady  once  asked  me  if  I  believed  in  ghosts  and  apparitions. 
I  answered  with  truth  and  simplicity  :  No,  madam  !  I  have  seen 
far  too  many  myself.  I  have  indeed  a  whole  memorandum-book 
filled  with  records  of  these  pliccnomena,  many  of  them  interest 
ing  as  facts  and  data  for  psychology,  and  affording  some  valuable 
materials  for  a  theory  of  perception,  and  its  dependence  on  the 
memory  and  imagination.  In  omnem  actum  perceptions  ima- 
ginatio  injluit  efficlenter,  says  AYolfe.  But  he*  is  no  more,  who 
would  have  realized  this  idea  ;  who  had  already  established  the 
foundations  and  the  law  of  the  theory  ;  and  for  whom  I  had  so 
often  found  a  pleasure  and  a  comfort,  even  during  the  wretched 
and  restless  nights  of  sickness,  in  watching  and  instantly  record 
ing  these  experiences  of  the  world  within  us,  of  the  gemina  na- 
tura,  quce  Jit  et  facif,,  ct  crcat  et  creatur  !  He  is  gone,  my  friend  ; 
my  munificent  co-patron,  and  not  less  the  benefactor  of  my  in 
tellect  ! — He  who,  beyond  all  other  men  known  to  me,  added  a 
fine  and  ever-wakeful  sense  of  beauty  to  the  most  patient  accu 
racy  in  experimental  philosophy  and  the  prof  bunder  researches 
of  metaphysical  science  ;  he  who  united  all  the  play  and  spring 
of  fancy  with  the  subtlest  discrimination  and  an  inexorable  judg- 
*  Thomas  Wedgwood. 


ESSAY    IV.  137 

ment ;  and  who  controlled  an  almost  painful  exquisiteness  of 
taste  by  a  warmth  of  heart,  which  in  the  practical  relations  of 
life  made  allowances  for  faults  as  quickly  as  the  moral  taste  de 
tected  them  ;  a  warmth  of  heart,  which  was  indeed  noble  and 
pre-eminent,  for  alas  !  the  genial  feelings  of  health  contributed 
no  spark  toward  it.  Of  these  qualities  I  may  speak,  for  they 
belonged  to  all  mankind. — The  higher  vitues,  that  were  blessings 
to  his  friends,  and  the  still  higher  that  resided  in  and  for  his 
own  soul,  are  themes  for  the  energies  of  solitude,  for  the  awful- 
ness  of  prayer  ! — virtues  exercised  in  the  barrenness  and  desola 
tion  of  his  animal  being  ;  while  he  thirsted  with  the  full  stream 
at  his  lips,  and  yet  with  unwearied  goodness  poured  out  to  all 
around  him,  like  the  master  of  a  feast  among  his  kindred  in  the 
day  of  his  own  gladness  !  Were  it  but  for  the  remembrance  of 
him  alone  and  of  his  lot  here  below,  the  disbelief  of  a  future  state 
would  sadden  the  earth  around  me,  and  blight  the  very  grass  in 
the  field. 


ESSAY    IV. 


rrch',  u  Aai/j.6vi£,  u/}  -xapadeiyfiaat  xpu/nevov,  iKavug  IvdeiKvvaOai  TI 
TUV  (j.ei£6vuv.     Kiv6vv£V£i  yap  ?/[iuv  t'/carof,  olov  ovap,  £idtj£  uTravra,  TTUVT' 

av  7TU/.IV  WCTTTfp  VTTCtp   d")'VO£tV.  PLATO,   PoliticUS. 

It  is  difficult,  excellent  friend  !  to  make  any  comprehensive  truth  com 
pletely  intelligible,  unless  we  avail  ourselves  of  an  example.  Otherwise  we 
may,  as  in  a  dream,  seem  to  know  all,  and  then,  as  it  were  awaking,  find 
that  we  know  nothing. 

AMONG  my  earliest  impressions  I  still  distinctly  remember  that 
of  my  first  entrance  into  the  mansion  of  a  neighboring  baronet, 
awfully  known  to  me  by  the  name  of  the  great  house,*  its  ex 
terior  having  been  long  connected  in  my  childish  imagination 
with  the  feelings  and  fancies  stirred  up  in  me  by  the  perusal  of 
the  Arabian  Nights'  Entertainments.  f  Beyond  all  other  objects, 

*  Escot,  near  Ottery  St.  Mary,  Devon,  then  the  seat  of  Sir  George 
Young,  and  since  burnt  down,  in  1808.  —  Ed. 

f  As  I  had  read  one  volume  of  these  tales  over  and  over  again  before 
my  fifth  birth-day,  it  may  be  readily  conjectured  of  what  sort  these  fancies 


138  THE   LANDING-PLACE. 

I  was  most  struck  with  the  magnificent  staircase,  relieved  at  well- 
proportioned  intervals  by  spacious  landing-places,  this  adorned 
with  grand  or  showy  plants,  the  next  looking  out  on  an  extensive 
prospect  through  the  stately  window,  with  its  side-panes  of  rich 
blues  and  saturated  amber  or  orange  tints  :  while  from  the  last 
and  highest  the  eye  commanded  the  whole  spiral  ascent  with  the 
marble  pavement  of  the  great  hall,  from  which  it  seemed  to 
spring  up  as  if  it  merely  used  the  ground  on  which  it  rested.  My 
readers  will  find  no  difficulty  in  translating  these  forms  of  the 
outward  senses  into  their  intellectual  analogies,  so  as  to  under 
stand  the  purport  of  The  Friend's  landing-places,  and  the  ob 
jects  I  proposed  to  myself,  in  the  small  groups  of  essays  inter 
posed  under  this  title  between  the  main  divisions  of  the  work. 

My  best  powers  would  have  sunk  within  me,  had  I  not  soothed 
my  solitary  toils  with  the  anticipation  of  many  readers — (wheth 
er  during  my  life,  or  when  my  grave  shall  have  shamed  my  de 
tractors  into  a  sympathy  with  its  own  silence,  formed  no  part  in 
this  self-flattery — )  who  would  submit  to  any  reasonable  trouble 
rather  than  read,  '  as  in  a  dream  seeming  to  know  all,  to  find  on 
awaking  that  they  know  nothing.'  Having,  therefore,  in  the 
three  preceding  essays  selected  from  my  conservatory  a  few 
plants,  of  somewhat  gayer  petals  and  a  livelier  green,  though 
like  the  geranium  tribe  of  a  sober  character  in  the  whole  physi 
ognomy  and  odor,  I  shall  first  devote  a  few  sentences  to  a  cata 
logue  of  my  introductory  lucubrations,  and  the  remainder  of  the 
essay  to  the  prospect,  as  far  as  it  can  be  seen  distinctly  from  our 
present  site.  Within  a  short  distance,  several  ways  meet  :  and 
at  that  point  only  does  it  appear  to  me  that  the  reader  will  be  in 
danger  of  mistaking  the  road.  Dropping  the  metaphor,  I  would 
say  that  there  is  one  term,  reason,  the  meaning  of  which  has  be 
come  unsettled.  To  different  persons  it  conveys  a  different  no 
tion,  and  riot  seldom  to  the  same  person  at  different  times  ;  while 
the  force,  and  to  a  certain  extent,  the  intelligibility  of  the  fbllow- 

and  feelings  must  have  been.  The  book,  I  well  remember,  used  to  lie  in 
a  corner  of  the  parlor-window  at  my  dear  father's  vicarage-house :  and  I 
can  never  forget  with  what  a  strange  mixture  of  obscure  dread  and  intense 
desire  I  used  to  look  at  the  volume  and  watch  it,  till  the  morning  sunshine 
had  reached  and  nearly  covered  it,  when,  and  not  before,  I  felt  the  courage 
given  me  to  seize  the  precious  treasure  and  hurry  off  with  it  to  some  sunny 
corner  in  our  play-ground. 


ESSAY  IV.  139 

ing  sections  depend  on  its  being  interpreted  in  one  sense  exclu 
sively. 

Essays  I.  to  IV.  inclusively  convey  the  design  and  contents  of 
the  work  ;  my  judgment  respecting  the  style,  and  my  defence  of 
myself  from  the  charges  of  arrogance  and  presumption.  Say 
rather,  that  such  are  the  personal  threads  of  the  discourse :  for  it 
will  not  have  escaped  the  reader's  observation,  that  even  in  these 
prefatory  pa^es  principles  and  truths  of  general  interest  form  the 
true  contents,  and  that  arnid  all  the  usual  compliments  arid  cour 
tesies  of  a  first  presentation  to  the  reader's  acquaintance  the  sub 
stantial  object  is  still  to  assert  the  practicability,  without  disguis 
ing  the  difficulties,  of  improving  the  morals  of  mankind  by  a  di 
rect  appeal  to  their  understandings  ;  to  show  the  distinction  be 
tween  attention  and  thought,  and  the  necessity  of  the  former  as 
a  habit  or  discipline  without  which  the  very  word,  thinking,  must 
remain  a  thoughtless  substitute  for  dreaming  with  our  eyes  open  ; 
and  lastly,  the  tendency  of  a  certain  fashionable  style  with  all  its 
accommodations  to  paralyze  the  very  faculties  of  manly  intellect 
by  a  series  of  petty  stimulants.  After  this  preparation,  I  proceed 
at  once  to  lay  the  foundations  common  to  the  whole  work  by  an 
inquiry  into  the  duty  of  communicating  truth,  and  the  conditions 
under  which  it  may  be  communicated  with  safety,  from  essay  V. 
to  XVI.  inclusively.  Each  essay  will,  I  believe,  be  found  com 
plete  in  itself,  yet  an  organic  part  of  the  whole  considered  as  one 
disquisition.  First,  the  inexpediency  of  pious  frauds  is  proved 
from  history,  the  shameless  assertion  of  the  indifference  of  truth 
and  falsehood  exposed  to  its  deserved  infamy,  and  an  answer 
given  to  the  objection  derived  from  the  impossibility  of  conveying 
an  adequate  notion  of  the  truths,  we  may  attempt  to  communi 
cate.  The  conditions  are  then  detailed,  under  which,  right 
though  inadequate  notions  may  be  taught  without  danger,  and 
proofs  given,  both  from  facts  and  from  reason,  that  he,  who  fulfils 
the  conditions  required  by  conscience,  takes  the  surest  way  of  an 
swering  the  purposes  of  prudence.  This  is,  indeed,  the  main 
characteristic  of  the  moral  system  taught  by  The  Friend  through 
out,  that  the  distinct  foresight  of  consequences  belongs  exclusively 
to  the  infinite  Wisdom  which  is  one  with  that  Almighty  Will,  on 
which  all  consequences  depend  ;  but  that  for  man — to  obey  the 
simple  unconditional  commandment  of  eschewing  every  act  that 
implies  a  self-contradiction,  or,  in  other  words,  to  produce  and 


140  THE    LANDING-PLACE. 

maintain  the  greatest  possible  harmony  in  the  component  im 
pulses  and  faculties  of  his  nature,  involves  the  effects  of  pru 
dence.  It  is,  as  it  were,  prudence  in  short-hand  or  cipher.  A 
pure  conscience,  that  inward  something,  that  6eog  olxsiog,  which 
being  absolutely  unique  no  man  can  describe,  because  every  man 
is  bound  to  know,  and  even  in  the  eye  of  the  law  is  held  to  be  a 
person  no  longer  than  he  may  be  supposed  to  know  it — the  con 
science,  I  say,  bears  the  same  relation  to  God,  as  an  accurate 
time-piece  bears  to  the  sun.  The  time-piece  merely  indicates  the 
relative  path  of  the  sun,  yet  we  can  regulate  our  plans  and  pro 
ceedings  by  it  with  the  same  confidence  as  if  it  was  itself  the 
efficient  cause  of  light,  heat,  arid  the  revolving  seasons  :  on  the 
self-evident  axiom,  that  in  whatever  sense  two  things — for  in 
stance,  A.  and  C.  D.  E., — are  both  equal  to  a  third  thing,  B., 
they  are  in  the  some  sense  equal  to  each  other.  Cunning  is  cir 
cuitous  folly.  In  plain  English,  to  act  the  knave  is  but  a  round 
about  way  of  playing  the  fool ;  and  the  man,  who  will  not  per 
mit  himself  to  call  an  action, by  its  proper  name  without  a  pre 
vious  calculation  of  all  its  probable  consequences,  may  be  indeed 
only  a  coxcomb,  who  is  looking  at  his  fingers  through  an  opera- 
glass  ;  but  he  runs  no  small  risk  of  becoming  a  knave.  The 
chances  are  against  him.  Though  he  should  begin  by  calculating 
the  consequences  with  regard  to  others,  yet  by  the  mere  habit  of 
never  contemplating  an  action  in  its  own  proportions  and  imme 
diate  relations  to  his  moral  being,  it  is  scarcely  possible  but  that 
he  must  end  in  selfishness  :  for  the  '  you,'  and  the  '  they'  will 
stand  on  different  occasions  for  a  thousand  different  persons,  while 
the  '  1'  is  one  only,  and  recurs  in  every  calculation.  Or  grant 
that  the  principle  of  expediency  should  prompt  to  the  same  out 
ward  deeds  as  are  commanded  by  the  law  of  reason  ;  yet  the  doer 
himself  is  debased.  But  if  it  be  replied,  that  the  reaction  on  the 
agent's  own  mind  is  to  form  a  part  of  the  calculation,  then  it  is  a 
rule  that  destroys  itself  in  the  very  propounding,  as  will  be  more 
fully  demonstrated  in  the  second  or  ethical  division  of  The  Friend, 
when  I  shall  have  detected  and  exposed  the  equivoque  between 
an  action  and  a  series  of  motions,  by  which  the  determinations 
of  the  will  are  to  be  realized  in  the  world  of  the  senses.  What 
modification  of  the  latter  corresponds  to  the  former,  and  is  enti 
tled  to  be  called  by  the  same  name,  will  often  depend  on  time, 
place,  persons  and  circumstances,  the  consideration  of  which  re- 


ESSAY    IV.  141 

quires  an  exertion  of  the  judgment ;  but  the  action  itself  remains 
the  same,  and  like  all  other  ideas  pre-exists  in  the  reason,  or,  in 
the  more  expressive  and  perhaps  more  precise  and  philosophical 
language  of  St.  Paul,  in  the  spirit,  unalterable  because  uncondi 
tional,  or  with  no  other  than  that  most  awful  condition,  as  sure 
as  God  liveth,  it  is  so  ! 

These  remarks  are  inserted  in  this  place,  because  the  principle 
admits  of  easiest  illustration  in  the  instance  of  veracity  and  the 
actions  connected  with  the  same,  and  may  then  be  intelligibly  ap 
plied  to  other  departments  of  morality,  all  of  which  Woollston- 
indeed  considers  as  only  so  many  different  forms  of  truth  and  false 
hood.  So  far  I  treated  of  oral  communication  of  the  truth.  The 
applicability  of  the  same  principle  is  then  tried  and  affirmed  in 
publications  by  the  press,  first  as  between  the  individual  and  his 
own  conscience,  and  then  between  the  publisher  arid  the  state  : 
and  under  this  head  I  have  considered  at  large  the  questions  of  a 
free  press  and  the  law  of  libel,  the  anomalies  and  peculiar  diffi 
culties  of  the  latter,  and  the  only  possible  solution  compatible 
with  the  continuance  of  the  former  :  a  solution  rising  out  of  and 
justified  by  the  necessarily  anomalous  and  unique  nature  of  the 
law  itself.  I  confess  that  I  look  back  on  this  discussion  concern 
ing  the  press  and  its  limits  with  a  satisfaction  unusual  to  me  in 
the  review  of  my  oAvn  labors  :  and  if  the  date  of  their  first  publi 
cation  (September,  1809)  be  remembered,  it  will  not  perhaps  be 
denied  on  an  impartial  comparison,  that  I  have  treated  this  most 
important  subject,  so  especially  interesting  in  the  present  time, 
more  fully  and  more  systematically  than  it  had  up  to  that  time 
been.  Interim  turn  rccti  conscientia,  turn  illo  meconsolor,  quod 
optimis  quibusque  certe  non  improbamur,  fartassis  omnibus 
placituri,  simul  atque  livor  ab  obitu  conquieverit. 

Lastly,  the  subject  is  concluded  even  as  it  commenced,  and  as 
beseemed  a  disquisition  placed  as  the  steps  and  vestibule  of  the 
whole  wrork,  with  an  enforcement  of  the  absolute  necessity  of 
principles  grounded  in  reason  as  the  basis  or  rather  as  the  living 
root  of  all  genuine  expedience.  Where  these  are  despised  or  at 
best  regarded  as  aliens  from  the  actual  business  of  life,  and  con 
signed  to  the  ideal  world  of  speculative  philosophy  and  Utopian 
politics,  instead  of  state  wisdom  we  shall  have  state-craft,  and  for 
the  talent  of  the  governor  the  cleverness  of  an  embarrassed  spend 
thrift — which  consists  in  tricks  to  shift  off  difficulties  and  dan- 


142  THE    LANDING-PLACE. 

gers  when  they  are  close  upon  us,  and  to  keep  them  at  arm's 
length,  not  in  solid  and  grounded  courses  to  preclude  or  subdue 
them.  We  must  content  ourselves  with  expedient-makers — with 
fire-engines  against  fires,  life-boats  against  inundations  ;  but  no 
houses  built  fire-proof,  no  dams  that  rise  above  the  water-mark. 
The  reader  will  have  observed  that  already  has  the  term,  reason 
oeen  frequently  contradistinguished  from  the  understanding  and 
the  judgment.  If  I  could  succeed  in  fully  explaining  the  sense 
in  which  the  word  reason  is  employed  by  me,  and  in  satisfying 
the  reader's  mind  concerning  the  grounds  and  importance  of  the 
distinction,  I  should  feel  little  or  no  apprehension  concerning  the 
intelligibility  of  these  essays  from  first  to  last.  The  following  sec 
tion  is  in  part  founded  on  this  distinction  :  the  which  remaining 
obscure,  all  else  will  be  so  as  a  system,  however  clear  the  com 
ponent  paragraphs  may  be,  taken  separately.  In  the  appendix* 
to  my  first  Lay  Sermon,  I  have,  indeed,  treated  the  question  at  con 
siderable  length,  but  chiefly  in  relation  to  the  heights  of  theology 
and  metaphysics.  In  the  next  number  I  attempt  to  explain  my 
self  more  popularly,  and  trust  that  with  no  great  expenditure  of 
attention  the  reader  will  satisfy  his  mind,  that  our  remote  ances 
tors  spoke  as  men  acquainted  with  the  constituent  parts  of  their 
own  moral  and  intellectual  being,  when  they  described  one  man 
as  "being  out  of  his  senses,"  another  as  "out  of  his  wits,"  or 
"deranged  in  his  understanding,"  and  a  third  as  having  "lost 
his  reason."  Observe,  the  understanding  may  be  deranged, 
weakened,  or  perverted ;  but  the  reason  is  either  lost  or  not  lost, 
that  is,  wholly  present  or  wholly  absent. 


ESSAY    V. 

• 

Man  may  rather  be  defined  a  religious  than  a  rational  creature,  in  regard 
that  in  other  creatures  there  may  be  something  of  reason,  but  there  is  noth 
ing  of  religion.  HARRINGTON. 

IF  the  reader  will  substitute  the  word  "  understanding"  for 
"  reason,"  and  the  word  "  reason"  for  "  religion,"  Harrington  has 
here  completely  expressed  the  truth  for  which  I  am  contending. 
Man  may  rather  be  defined  a  rational  than  an  intelligent  crea 
ture,  in  regard  that  in  other  creatures  there  may  be  something  of 
understanding,  but  there  is  nothing  of  reason.  But  that  this  was 
Harrington's  meaning  is  evident.  Otherwise,  instead  of  compar 
ing  two  faculties  with  each  other,  he  would  contrast  a  faculty 
with  one  of  its  own  objects,  which  would  involve  the  same  ab 
surdity  as  if  he  had  said,  that  man  might  rather  be  defined  an 
astronomical  than  a  seeing  animal,  because  other  animals  pos 
sessed  the  sense  of  sight,  but  were  incapable  of  beholding  the 
satellites  of  Saturn,  or  the  nebula  of  fixed  stars.  If  further  con 
firmation  be  necessary,  it  may  be  supplied  by  the  following 
reflections,  the  leading  thought  of  which  I  remember  to  have 
read  in  the  works  of  a  continental  philosopher.  It  should  seem 
easy  to  give  the  definite  distinction  of  the  reason  fxom  the  un 
derstanding,  because  we  constantly  imply  it  when  we  speak  of 
the  difference  between  ourselves  arid  the  brute  creation.  No  one, 
except  as  a  figure  of  speech,  ever  speaks  of  an  animal  reason  ;* 

*  I  have  this  moment  looked  over  a  translation  of  Blumenbach's  Physiol 
ogy,  by  Dr.  Elliotson,  which  forms  a  glaring  exception,  p.  45.  I  do  not 
know  Dr.  Elliotson,  but  I  do  know  Professor  Blumenbach,  and  was  an 
assiduous  attendant  on  the  lectures,  of  which  this  classical  work  was  the 
text-book  ;  and  I  know  that  that  good  and  great  man  wrould  start  back  with 
surprise  and  indignation  at  the  gross  materialism  mortised  on  to  his  work : 
the  more  so  because  during  the  whole  period,  in  which  the  identification 
of  man  with  the  brute  in  kind  was  the  fashion  of  naturalists,  Blumeubach 


144  THE    LANDING-PLACE. 

but  that  many  animals  possess  a  share  of  understanding,  per 
fectly  distinguishable  from  mere  instinct,  we  all  allow.  Few 
persons  have  a  favorite  dog  without  making  instances  of  its  in 
telligence  an  occasional  topic  of  conversation.  They  call  for  our 
admiration  of  the  individual  animal,  and  not  with  exclusive 
reference  to  the  wisdom  in  nature,  as  in  the  case  of  the  aiooj'T], 
or  maternal  instinct  of  beasts  ;  or  of  the  hexangular  cells  of  the 
bees,  and  the  wonderful  coincidence  of  this  form  with  the  geo 
metrical  demonstration  of  the  largest  possible  number  of  rooms 
in  a  given  space.  Likewise,  we  distinguish  various  degrees  of 
understanding  there,  and  even  discover  from  inductions  supplied 
by  the  zoologists,  that  the  understanding  appears,  as  a  general 
rule,  in  an  inverse  proportion  to  the  instinct.  We  hear  little  or 
nothing  of  the  instincts  of  the  "half-reasoning  elephant,"  and  as 
little  of  the  understanding  of  caterpillars  and  butterflies.^  But 
reason  is  wrholly  denied,  equally  to  the  highest  as  to  the  lowest  of 
the  brutes  ;  otherwise  it  must  be  wholly  attributed  to  them,  and 
with  it  therefore  self-consciousness,  and  personality,  or  moral  being. 
I  should  have  no  objection  to  define  reason  with  Jacobi,f  and 
with  his  friend  Hemsterhuis,  as  an  organ  bearing  the  same  rela 
tion  to  spiritual  objects,  the  universal,  the  eternal,  and  the 
necessary,  as  the  eye  bears  to  material  and  contingent  phenomena. 
But  then  it  must  be  added,  that  it  is  an  organ  identical  with  its 
appropriate  objects.  Thus,  God,  the  soul,  eternal  truth,  &c.,  are 

remained  ardent  and  instant  in  controverting  the  opinion,  and  exposing  its 
fallacy  and  falsehood,  both  as  a  man  of  sense  and  as  a  naturalist.  I  may 
truly  say,  that  it  was  uppermost  in  his  heart  and  foremost  in  his  speech. 
Therefore,  and  from  no  hostile  feeling  to  Dr.  Elliotson  (whom  I  hear  spoken 
of  with  great  regard  and  respect,  and  to  whom  I  myself  give  credit  for  his 
manly  openness  in  the  avowal  of  his  opinions),  I  have  felt  the  present  ani 
madversion  a  duty  of  justice  as  well  as  gratitude.  April  8,  1817. 

*  Note,  that  though  "  reasoning"  does  not  in  our  language,  in  the  lax  use 
of  words  natural  in  conversation  or  popular  writings,  imply  scientific  con 
clusion,  yet  the  phrase  "half-reasoning"  is  evidently  used  by  Pope  as  a 
poetic  hyperbole. 

f  Von  den  Gottlichen  Dingcn,  Bcilage  A.  Jacobi,  in  this  passage,  speaks 
of  reason  in  man  as  being  recipient  rather  than  originant,  and  of  this  as  the 
true  Platonic  doctrine.  The  affirmation  of  identity  rather  than  pre-con- 
formity  between  the  finite  and  infinite  Reason,  by  Coleridge,  in  this 
passage,  is  more  than  Jacobi  is  ready  to  affirm,  as  Coleridge  evidently 
neans  to  indicate  by  his  criticism.  A  better  statement  of  the  doctrine  may 
be  found  in  an  extract  from  John  Smith,  I.  p.  264,  note. — Am.  Ed. 


ESSAY   V.  145 

the  objects  of  reason  ;  but  they  are  themselves  reason.  "We  name 
God  the  Supreme  Reason ;  and  Milton  says, — 

•  — whence  the  soul 

Reason  receives,  and  reason  is  her  being.* 

Whatever  is  conscious  self-knowledge  is  reason  :  and  in  this  sense 
it  may  be  safely  defined  the  organ  of  the  supersensuous  ;  even  as 
the  understanding  wherever  it  does  not  possess  or  use  the  reason, 
as  its  inward  eye,  may  be  defined  the  conception  of  the  sensuous, 
or  the  faculty  by  which  we  generalize  and  arrange  the  phenom 
ena  of  perception  ;  that  faculty,  the  functions  of  which  contain 
the  rules  and  constitute  the  possibility  of  outward  experience. 
In  short,  the  understanding  supposes  something  that  is  under 
stood.  This  may  be  merely  its  own  acts  or  forms,  that  is,  formal 
logic ;  but  real  objects,  the  materials  of  substantial  knowledge, 
must  be  furnished,  I  might  safely  say  revealed,  to  it  by  organs  of 
sense.  The  understanding  of  the  higher  brutes  has  only  organs 
of  outward  sense,  and  consequently  material  objects  only ;  but 
man's  understanding  has  likewise  an  organ  of  inward  sense,  and 
therefore  the  power  of  acquainting  itself  with  invisible  realities 
or  spiritual  objects.  This  organ  is  his  reason. 

Again,  the  understanding  and  experience  may  existf  without 
reason.  But  reason  can  not  exist  without  understanding ;  nor 
does  it  or  can  it  manifest  itself  but  in  and  through  the  under 
standing,!  which  in  our  elder  writers  is  often  called  discourse,  or 
the  discursive  faculty,  as  by  Hooker,  Lord  Bacon,  and  Hobbes  : 
and  an  understanding  enlightened  by  reason  Shakspeare  gives  as 
the  contradistinguishing  character  of  man,  under  the  name  '  dis 
course  of  reason.'  In  short,  the  human  understanding  possesses 
two  distinct  organs,  the  outward  sense,  and  the  mind's  eye,  which 
is  reason  :  wherever  we  use  that  phrase,  the  '  mind's  eye,'  in  its 
proper  sense,  and  not  as  a  mere  synonyme  of  the  memory  or  the 

*  P.  L.  v.  486.— Ed. 

f  Of  this  no  one  would  feel  inclined  to  doubt,  who  had  seen  the  poodle 
dog,  whom  the  celebrated  BLUMENBACH, — a  name  so  dear  to  science,  as  a 
physiologist  and  comparative  anatomist,  and  not  less  dear  as  a  man  to  all 
Englishmen  who  have  ever  resided  at  Gottingen  in  the  course  of  their  edu 
cation, — trained  up,  not  only  to  hatch  the  eggs  of  the  hen  with  all  the 
mother's  care  and  patience,  but  to  attend  the  chickens  afterwards,  and  find 
the  food  for  them.  I  .have  myself  known  a  Newfoundland  dog,  who  watched 
and  guarded  a  family  of  young  children  with  all  the  intelligence  of  a  nurse, 
during  their  walks. 

VOL.  II.  G 


146  THE    LANDING-PLACE. 

fancy.  In  this  way  we  reconcile  the  promise  of  revelatior  that 
the  blessed  will  see  God,  with  the  declaration  of  St.  John,  No 
man  Jiath  seen  God  at  any  time.* 

I  will  add  one  other  illustration  to  prevent  any  misconception, 
.  as  if  I  were  dividing  the  human  soul  into  different  essences,  or 
ideal  persons.  In  this  piece  of  steel  I  acknowledge  the  properties 
of  hardness,  brittleness,  high  polish,  and  the  capability  of  form 
ing  a  mirror.  I  find  all  these  likewise  in  the  plate  glass  of  a 
friend's  carriage  ;  but  in  addition  to  all  these  I  find  the  quality 
of  transparency,  or  the  power  of  transmitting,  as  well  as  of  re 
flecting,  the  rays  of  light.  The  application  is  obvious. 

If  the  reader  therefore  will  take  the  trouble  of  bearing  in 
mind  these  and  the  following  explanations,  he  will  have  removed 
beforehand  every  possible  difficulty  from  The  Friend's  political 
section.  For  there  is  another  use  of  the  word,  reason,  arising  out 
of  the  former  indeed,  but  less  definite,  and  more  exposed  to  mis 
conception.  In  'this  latter  use  it  means  the  understanding  con 
sidered  as  using  the  reason,  so  far  as  by  the  organ  of  reason  only 
we  possess  the  ideas  of  the  necessary  and  the  universal ;  and  this 
is  the  more  common  use  of  the  word,  when  it  is  applied  with  any 
attempt  at  clear  and  distinct  conceptions.  In  this  narrower  and 
derivative  sense  the  best  definition  of  reason,  which  I  can  give, 
will  be  found  in  the  third  member  of  the  following  sentence,  in 
which  the  understanding  is  described  in  its  three-fold  operation, 
and  from  each  receives  an  appropriate  name.  The  sense, — vis 
sensitiva  vel  intuitiva — perceives  :  vis  regulatrix — the  under 
standing,  in  its  own  peculiar  operation — conceives  :  vis  ration- 
alis — the  reason  or  rationalized  understanding — comprehends. 
The  first  is  impressed  through  the  organs  of  sense ;  the  second 
combines  these  multifarious  impressions  into  individual  notions, 
and  by  reducing  these  notions  to  rules,  according  to  the  analogy 
of  all  its  former  notices,  constitutes  experience  :  the  third -subor 
dinates  both  of  them,  the  notions,  namely,  and  the  rules  of  ex 
perience,  to  absolute  principles  or  necessary  laws  :  and  thus  con 
cerning  objects,  which  our  experience  has  proved  to  have  real 
existence,  it  demonstrates,  moreover,  in  what  wa^they  are  possi 
ble,  and  in  doing  this  constitutes  science.  Reason  therefore,  in 
this  secondary  sense,  and  used,  not  as  a  spiritual  organ,  but  as  a 

*  1  Ep.  iv.  12.— Ed. 


ESSAY    V.  147 

faculty,  namely,  the  understanding  or  soul  enlightened  by  that 
organ, — reason,  I  say,  or  the^  scientific  faculty,  is  the  intellection 
of  the  possibility  or  essential  properties  of  things  by  means  of  the 
laws  that  constitute  them.  Thus  the  rational  idea  of  a  circle  is 
that  of  a  figure  constituted  by  the  circumvolution  of  a  straight 
line  with  its  one  end  fixed. 

Every  man  must  feel,  that  though  he  may  not  be  exerting 
different  faculties,  he  is  exerting  his  faculties  in  a  different  way, 
when  in  one  instance  he  begins^  with  some  one  self-evident 
truth, — that  the  radii  of  a  circle,  for  instance,  are  all  equal, — 
and  in  consequence  of  this  being  true  sees  at  once,  without  any 
actual  experience,  that  some  other  thing  must  be  true  likewise, 
and  that,  this  being  true,  some  third  thing  must  be  equally  true, 
and  so  on  till  he  comes,  wre  will  say,  to  the  properties  of  the  lever, 
considered  as  the  spoke  of  a  circle  ;  which  is  capable  of  having 
all  its  marvellous  powers  demonstrated  even  to  a  savage  who  had 
never  seen  a  lever,  and  without  supposing  any  other  previous 
knowledge  in  his  mind,  but  this  one,  that  there  is  a  conceivable 
figure,  all  possible  lines  from  the  middle  to  the  circumference  of 
which  are  of  the  same  length  :  or  when,  in  another  instance,  he 
brings  together  the  facts- of  experience,  each  of  which  has  its  own 
separate  value,  neither  increased  nor  diminished  by  the  truth  of 
any  other  fact  which  may  have  preceded  it  ;  and  making  these 
several  facts  bear  upon  some  particular  project,  and  finding  some 
in  favor  of  it,  and  some  against  it,  determines  for  or  against  the 
project,  according  as  one  or  the  other  class  of  facts  preponderate  : 
as,  for  example,  whether  it  would  be  better  to  plant  a  particular 
spot  of  ground  with  larch,  or  with  Scotch  fir,  or  with  oak  in 
preference  to  either.  Surely  every  man  will  acknowledge,  that 
his  mind  was  very  differently  employed  in  the  first  case  from 
what  it  was  in  the  second  ;  and  all  men  have  agreed  to  call  the 
results  of  the  first  class  the  truths  of  science,  such  as  not  only  are 
true,  but  which  it  is  impossible  to  conceive  otherwise  :  while  the 
results  of  the  second  class  are  called  facts,  or  things  of  experi 
ence  :  and  as  to  these  latter  we  must  often  content  ourselves  with 
the  greater  probability,  that  they  are  so  or  so,  rather  than  other 
wise — nay,  even  when  we  have  no  doubt  that  they  are  so  in  the 
particular  case,  we  never  presume  to  assert  that  they  must  con 
tinue  so  always,  and  under  all  circumstances.  On  the  contrary, 
our  conclusions  depend  altogether  on  contingent  circumstances. 


148  THE    LANDING-PLACE. 

Now  when  the  mind  is  employed,  as  in  the  case  first  mentioned, 
I  call  it  reasoning,  or  the  use  of  the  pure  reason  ;  but,  in  the 
second  case,  the  understanding  or  prudence. 

This  reason  applied  to  the  motives  of  our  conduct,  and  com 
bined  with  the  sense  of  our  moral  responsibility,  is  the  conditional 
cause  of  conscience,  which  is  a  spiritual  sense  or  testifying  state 
of  the  coincidence  or  discordance  of  the  free  will  with  the  reason. 
But  as  the  reasoning  consists  wholly  in  a  man's  power  of  seeing, 
whether  any  two  conceptions  ^which  happen  to  be  in  his  mind, 
are,  or  are  not  in  contradiction  to  each  other,  it  follows  of  neces 
sity,  not  only  that  all  men  have  reason,  but  that  every  man  has 
it  in  the  same  degree.  For  reasoning,  or  reason,  in  this  its  sec 
ondary  sense,  does  not  consist  in  the  conceptions  themselves  or  in 
their  clearness,  but  simply,  when  they  are  in  the  mind,  in  seeing 
whether  they  contradict  each  other  or  no. 

And  again,  as  in  the  determinations  of  conscience  the  only 
knowledge  required  is  that  of  my  own  intention — whether  in  do 
ing  such  a  thing,  instead  of  leaving  it  undone,  I  did  what  I  should 
think  right  if  any  other  person  had  done  it ;  it  folio AVS  that  in  the 
mere  question  of  guilt  or  innocence,  all  men  have  not  only  reason 
equally,  but  likewise  all  the  materials  on,  which  the  reason,  con 
sidered  as  conscience,  is  to  work.  But  when  we  pass  out  of  our 
selves,  and  speak,  not  exclusively  of  the  agent  as  meaning  well 
or  ill,  but  of  the  action  in  its  consequences,  then  of  course  experi 
ence  is  required,  judgment  in  making  use  of  it,  and  all  those  other 
qualities  of  the  mind  which  are  so  differently  dispensed  to  differ 
ent  persons,  both  by  nature  and  education.  And  though  the  rea 
son  itself  is  the  same  in  all  men,  yet  the  means  of  exercising  it, 
and  the  materials, — that  is,  the  facts  and  conceptions — on  which 
it  is  exercised,  being  possessed  in  very  different  degrees  by  differ 
ent  persons,  the  practical  result  is,  of  course,  equally  different — 
and  the  whole  ground-work  of  Rousseau's  philosophy  ends  in  a 
mere  nothingism. — Even  in  that  branch  of'knowledge,  where  the 
conceptions,  on  the  congruity  of  which  with  each  other,  the  rea 
son  is  to  decide,  are  all  possessed  alike  by  all  men,  namely  in 
geometry  ; — for  all  men  in  their  senses  possess  all  the  component 
images,  namely  simple  curves  and  straight  lines  ;  yet  the  power 
of  attention  required  for  the  perception  of  linked  truths,  even  of 
such  truths,  is  so  very  different  in  A  and  in  B,  that  Sir  Isaac 
Newton  professed  that  it  was  in  this  power  only  that  .he  was 


ESSAY    V.  149 

superior  to  ordinary  men.  In  short,  the  sophism  is  as  gross  as 
if  I  should  say, — the  souls  of  all  men  have  the  faculty  of  sight  in 
an  equal  degree — forgetting  to  add,  that  this  faculty  can  not  be 
exercised  without  eyes,  and  that  some  men  are  blind  and  others 
short-sighted, — and  should  then  take  advantage  of  this  my  omis 
sion  to  conclude  against  the  use  or  necessity  of  spectacles,  and 
microscopes, — or  of  choosing  the  sharpest-sighted  men  for  our 
guides. 

Having  exposed  this  gross  sophism,  I  must  warn  against  an 
opposite  error — namely,  that  if  reason,  as  distinguished  from  pru 
dence,  consists  merely  in  knowing  that  black  can  not  be  white — 
or  when  a  man  has  a  clear  conception  of  an  inclosed  figure,  and 
another  equally  clear  conception  of  a  straight  line,  his  reason 
teaches  him  that  these  two  conceptions  are  incompatible  in  the 
same  object,  that  is,  that  two  straight  lines  can  not  include  a 
space the  reason  must  therefore  be  a  very  insignificant  fac 
ulty.  For  a  moment's  steady  self-reflection  wiD  show  us,  that 
in  the  simple  determination  '  black  is  not  white'-  -or,  '  that  two 
straight  lines  can  not  include  a  space' — all  the  powers  are  im 
plied,  that  distinguish  man  from  animals  ; — first,  the  power  of 
reflection — 2d,  of  comparison — 3d,  and  therefore  of  suspension  of 
the  mind — 4th,  therefore  of  a  controlling  will,  and  the  power  of 
acting  from  notions,  instead  of  mere  images  exciting  appetites  ; 
from  motives,  and  not  from  mere  dark  instincts.  Was  it  an  in 
significant  thing  to  weigh  the  planets,  to  determine  all  their 
courses,  and  prophesy  every  possible  relation  of"  the  heavens  a 
thousand  years  hence  ?  Yet  all  this  mighty  chain  of  science  is 
nothing  but  a  linking  together  of  truths  of  the  same  kind,  as,  the 
whole  is  greater  than  its  part ;— or,  if  A  and  B  =  C,  then  A  =  B  : 
or  3  +  4  =  7,  therefore  7 -f  5  =  12,  and  so  forth.  X  is  to  be 
found  either  in  A  or  B,  or  C  or  D  :  it  is  not  found  in  A,  B,  or  0  ; 
therefore  it  is  to  be  found  in  D.  What  can  be  simpler  ?  Apply 
this  to  a  brute  animal.  A  dog  misses  his  master  where  four 
roads  meet ; — he  has  come  up  one,  smells  to  two  of  the  others, 
and  then  with  his  head  aloft  darts  forward  to  the  fourth  road 
without  any  examination.  If  this  were  done  by  a  conclusion, 
the  dog  would  have  reason  ; — how  comes  it  then,  that  he  never 
shows  it  in  his  ordinary  habits  ?  Why  does  this  story  excite 
either  wonder  or  incredulity  ? — If  the  story  be  a  fact,  and  not  a 
fiction,  I  should  say — the  breeze  brought  his  master's  scent  down 


150  THE    LANDING-PLACE. 

the  fourth  road  to  the  dog's  nose,  and  that  therefore  he  did  not 
put  it  down  to  the  road,  as  in  the  two  former  instances.  So  aw 
ful  and  almost  miraculous  does  the  simple  act  of  concluding,  that 
'  take  three  from  four,  there  remains  one,'  appear  to  us,  when  at 
tributed  to  one  of  the  most  sagacious  of  all  brute  animals. 


THE     FRIEND, 

SECTION  THE  FIRST. 
ON  THE  PRINCIPLES  OF  POLITICAL  KNOWLEDGE. 


Hoc  potissimum  pacto  felicem  ac  magnum  regem  se  fore  judicans,  non  si 
tpiam  plurimis  sed  si  quam  optimis  impcret.  Proinde  parum  e'sse  putat  justis 
praesidiis  regnum  suum  muniisse,  nisi  idem  viris  eruditione  juxta  ac  vitce  in- 
legritate  precceUentibus  ditct  clique  honestet.  Nimirum  intelligit  hccc  demum 
esse.  tera  regni  decora,  has  vcras  oj)e-s. 

ERASMUS  :  EPIST.  AD  EPISC.  PARIS. 


THE    FRIEND. 


ESSAY  I. 

Dum  politici  scepiuscule  hominibus  magis  insidiantur  qu am  consu lunt, po 
tius  callidi  quam  sapientes  ;  thcoretici  e  contrario  se  rern  divinam  facere  et 
sapientice  culmen  attingere  credunt,  quando  humanam  naturam,  quce  nullibi 
est,  multis  modis  laudare,  et  earn,  quce  re  vera  est,  dictis  lacessere  norunt, 
Undefactum  cst,  ut  nunquam  polilicam  conceperint  quce  possit  ad  usum  re- 
vocari  ;  sed  quce  in  Utopia  vel  in  illo  poetarum  aureo  sccculo,  ubi  scilicet 
minime  necesse  erat,  institui  potuisset.  At  mild  plane  pcrsuadco,  experien- 
tiam  omnia  civitatum  genera,  quce  concipi  possunt  ut  homines  concorditer 
vivant,  et  simul  media,  quibus  multitudo  dirigi,  seu  quibus  intra  certos  lim- 
ites  contineri  debeat,  ostcndisse :  ita  ut  non  credam,  nos  posse  aliquid,  quod 
ab  expericntia  sive  praxi  non  abhorrcat,  cogitatione  de  hac  re  assequi,  quod 
nondum  expertum  compertumque  sit. 

Cum  igitur  animum  ad  politicam  applicuerim,  nihil  quod  novum  vel  in- 
auditum  est ;  sed  tantum  ea  quce  cum  praxi  optime  conveniuiit,  certa  et  in- 
dubitata  ratione  dcmonstrare  aut  ex  ipsa  humance  natures  conditions  dcducere, 
intendi.  Et  ut  ea  quce  ad  hanc  scientiam  spectant,  eadem  animi  libertate, 
qua  res  matJiematicas  solemus,  inquirerem,  sedulo  curavi  humanas  actiones 
non  ridere,  non  lugere,  neque  detestari  ;  sedinteliigerc.  Nee  ad  imperil  se~ 
curitatcm  refert  quo  animo  homines  inducantur  ad  res  recte  administrandas, 
modo  res  recte  administrentur.  Animi  enim  libertas,  seu  fortitude,  privata, 
virtus  est ;  at  imperil  virtus  securitas.  SPINOSA  Op.  Post.  p.  267. 

While  the  mere  practical  statesman  too  often  rather  plots  against  man 
kind,  than  consults  their  interest,  crafty,  not  wise ;  the  mere  theorists,  on 
the  other  hand,  imagine  that  they  are  employed  in  a  glorious  work,  and 
believe  themselves  at  the  very  summit  of  earthly  wisdom,  when  they  are 
able,  in  set  and  varied  language,  to  extol  that  human  nature,  which  ex 
ists  nowhere,  except  indeed  in  their  own  fancy,  and  to  accuse  and  vilify 
our  nature  as  it  really  is.  Hence  it  has  happened,  that  these  men  have 
never  conceited  a  practicable  scheme  of  civil  policy,  but,  at  best,  such 
forms  of  government  only,  as  might  have  been  instituted  in  Utopia,  or 
during  the  golden  age  of  the  poets :  that  is  to  say,  forms  of  government 
excellently  adapted  for  those  who  need  no  government  at  all.  But  I  am 


154  THE    FRIEND. 

fully  persuaded,  that  experience  has  already  brought  to  light  all  conceiv 
able  sorts  of  political  institutions  under  which  human  society  can  be 
maintained  in  concord,  and  likewise  the  chief  means  of  directing  the  mul 
titude,  or  retaining  them  within  given  boundaries  :  so  that  I  can  hardly 
believe,  that  on  this  subject  the  deepest  research  would  arrive  at  any  re 
sult,  not  abhorrent  from  experience  and  practice,  which  has  not  been  al 
ready  tried  and  proved. 

When,  therefore,  I  applied  my  thoughts  to  the  study  of  political  philos 
ophy,  I  proposed  to  myself  nothing  original  or  strange  as  the  fruits  of 
my  reflections  ;  but  simply  to  demonstrate  from  plain  and  undoubted 
principles,  or  to  deduce  from  the  very  condition  and  necessities  of  human 
nature,  those  plans  and  maxims  which  square  the  best  with  practice.  And 
that  in  all  things  which  relate  to  this  province,  I  might  conduct  my  inves 
tigations  with  the  same  freedom  of  intellect  with  which  we  proceed  in 
questions  of  pure  science,  I  sedulously  disciplined  my  mind  neither  to  laugh 
at,  nor  bewail,  nor  detest,  the  actions  of  men ;  but  to  understand  them. 
For  to  the  safety  of  the  state  it  is  not  of  necessary  importance  what  mo 
tives  induce  men  to  administer  public  affairs  rightly,  provided  only  that 
public  affairs  be  rightly  administered.*  For  moral  strength,  or  freedom 
from  the  selfish  passions,  is  the  virtue  of  individuals ;  but  security  is  the 
virtue  of  a  state. 


ON  THE   PRINCIPLES   OF  POLITICAL   PHILOSOPHY. 

ALL  the  different  philosophical  systems  of  political  justice,  all 
the  theories  on  the  rightful  origin  of  government,  are  reducible 
in  the  end  to  three  classes,  correspondent  to  the  three  different 
points  of  view,  in  which  the  human  being  itself  may  be  con 
templated.  The  first  denies  all  truth  and  distinct  meaning  to 
the  words,  right  and  duty  ;  and  affirming  that  the  human  mind 
consists  of  nothing  but  the  manifold  modifications  of  passive  sen 
sation,  considers  men  as  the  highest  sort  of  animals  indeed,  but 
at  the  same  time  the  most  wretched  ;  inasmuch  as  their  defence 
less  nature  forces  them  into  society  :  while  such  is  the  multipli 
city  of  wants  engendered  by  the  social  state,  that  the  wishes  of 
one  are  sure  to  be  in  contradiction  to  those  of  some  other.  The 
assertors  of  this  system  consequently  ascribe  the  origin  and  con 
tinuance  of  government  to  fear,  or  the  power  of  the  stronger, 
aided  by  the  force  of  custom.  This  is  the  system  of  Hobbes. 
Its  statement  is  its  confutation.  It  is,  indeed,  in  the  literal  sense 

*  I  regret,  that  I  should  have  given,  by  thus  selecting  it  *for  my  motto, 
an  implied  consent  to  this  very  plausible,  but  false  and  dangerous  position. 
1830. 


ESSAY    I.  155 

of  the  word,  preposterous ;  for  fear  pre-supposes  conquest,  and 
conquest  a  previous  union  and  agreement  between  the  conquerors. 
A  vast  empire  may  perhaps  be  governed  by  fear  ;  at  least  the 
supposition  is  not  absolutely  inconceivable,  under  circumstances 
which  prevent  the  consciousness  of  a  common  strength.     A  mil 
lion  of  men  united  by  mutual  confidence  and  free  intercourse  of 
thoughts  form  one  power,  and  this  is  as  much  a  real  thing  as  a 
steam-engine  ;  l$it  a  million  of  insulated  individuals  is  only  an 
abstraction  of  the  mind,  and  but  one  told  so  many  times  over 
without  addition,  as  an  idiot  would  tell  the  clock  at  noon — one, 
one,  one.     But  when,  in  the  first  instances,  the  descendants  of 
one  family  joined  together  to  attack  those  of  another  family,  it 
is  impossible  that  their  chief  or  leader  should  have  appeared  to 
them  stronger  than  all  the  rest  together  ;  they  must  therefore 
have  chosen  him,  and  this  as  for  particular  purposes,  so  doubt 
less  under  particular  conditions,  expressed  or  understood.     Such 
we  know  to  be  the  case  with  the  North  American  tribes  at  pres 
ent  ;  such,  we  are  informed  by  history,  was  the  case  with  our 
own  remote  ancestors.     Therefore,  even  on  the  system  of  those 
who,  in  contempt  of  the  oldest  and  most  authentic  records,  con 
sider  the  savage  as  the  first  and  natural  state  of  man,  government 
must  have  originated  in  choice  and  an  agreement.     The  appa 
rent  exceptions  in  Africa   and  Asia  are,  if  possible,  still  more 
subversive  of  this  system  :  for  they  will  be  found  to  have  origi 
nated  in  religious  imposture,  and  the  first  chiefs  to  have  secured 
a  willing  and  enthusiastic  obedience  to  themselves  as  delegates 
of  the  Deity. 

But  the  whole  theory  is  baseless.  We  are  told  by  history,  we 
learn  from  our  experience,  we  know  from  our  own  hearts,  that 
fear,  of  itself,  is  utterly  incapable  of  producing  any  regular,  con-, 
tinuous,  and  calculable  effect,  even  on  an  individual  ;  and  that 
the  fear,  which  does  act  systematically  upon  the  mind,  always 
pre-supposes  a  sense  of  duty,  as  its  cause.  The  most  cowardly 
of  the  European  nations,  the  Neapolitans  and  Sicilians,  those 
among  whom  the  fear  of  death  exercises  the  most  tyrannous  in 
fluence  relatively  to  their  own  persons,  are  the  very  men  who 
least  fear  to  take  away  the  life  of  a  fellow-citizen  by  poison  or  as 
sassination  ;  while  in  Great  Britain,  a  tyrant,  who  has  abused 
the  power,  which  a  vast  property  has  given  him,  to  oppress  a 
whole  neighborhood,  can  walk  in  safety  unarmed  and  unattended, 


15G  THE    FRIEim 

amid  a  hundred  men,  each  of  whom  feels  his  heart  burn  with 
rage  and  indignation  at  the  sight  of  him.  It  was  this  man  who 
broke  my  father's  heart ;  or,  it  is  through  him  that  my  children 
are  clad  in  rags,  and  cry  for  the  food  which  I  am  no  longer  able 
to  provide  for  them.  And  yet  they  dare  not  touch  a  hair  of  his 
head  !  Whence  does  this  arise  ?  Is  it  from  a  cowardice  of  sen 
sibility  that  makes  the  injured  man  shudder  at  the  thought  of 
shedding  blood  ?  Or  from  a  cowardice  of  selfishness  which 
makes  him  afraid  of  hazarding  his  own  life  ?*  Neither  the  one 
nor  the  other  !  The  field  of  Waterloo,  as  the  most  recent  of  a 
hundred  equal  proofs,  has  borne  witness  that, — 

bring  a  Briton  frae  his  hill, 

****** 

Say,  such  is  royal  George's  will, 

An'  there's  the  foe, 
He  has  nae  thought  but  how  to  kill 

Twa  at  a  blow. 

Nae  cauld,  faint-hearted  doubtings  tease  him  ; 
Death  comes,  wi'  fearless  eye  he  sees  him ; 
~Wi'  bluidy  hand,  a  welcome  gies  him ; 

And  when  he  fa's, 
His  latest  draught  o'  breathin'  leaves  him   . 

In  faint  huzzas.* 

Whence  then  arises  the  difference  of  feeling  in  the  former  case  ? 
To  what  does  the  oppressor  owe  his  safety  ?  To  the  spirit-quell 
ing  thought ; — the  laws  of  God  and  of  my  country  have  made 
his  life  sacred !  I  dare  not  touch  a  hair  of  his  head  ! — 'Tis  con 
science  that  makes  cowards  of  us  all, — but  oh  !  it  is  conscience 
too  which  makes  heroes  of  us  all. 

*  Bums.— Ed, 


ESSAY  II. 

Le  plus  fort  n'est  jamais  assez  fort  pour  &tre  toujours  le  maitre,  tfil  ne 
transforme  sa  force  en  droit  et  I'obeissance  en  devoir.  RousgEAU. 

Viribus  parantur  provincice,  jure  retinentur.  Igitur  breve  id  gaudium, 
quippe  Germani  victi  magis,  quam  domiti.  FLORUS,  iv.  12.* 

The  strongest  is  never  strong  enough  to  be  always  the  master,  unless  he 
transforms  his  power  into  right,  and  obedience  into  duty. 

Provinces  are  taken  by  force,  but  they  j|re  kept  by  right.  This  exulta 
tion  therefore  was  of  brief  continuance,  inasmuch  as  the  Germans  had  been 
overcome,  but  not  subdued. 

A  TRULY  great  man,f  the  best  and  greatest  public  character 
that  I  had  ever  the  opportunity  of  making  myself  acquainted 
with, — on  assuming  the  command  of  a  man  of  war,  found  a  mu 
tinous  crew,  more  than  one  half  of  them  uneducated  Irishmen, 
and  of  the  remainder  no  small  portion  had  become  sailors  by 
compromise  of  punishment.  What  terror  could  effect  by  severity 
and  frequency  of  acts  of  discipline,  had  been  already  effected. 
And  what  was  this  effect  ?  Something  like  that  of  a  polar  win 
ter  on  a  flask  of  brandy.  The  furious  spirit  concentered  rfself 
with  tenfold  strength  at  the  heart ;  open  violence  was  changed 
into  secret  plots  and  conspiracies  ;  and  the  consequent  orderliness 
of  the  crew,  as  far  as  they  were  orderly,  was  but  the  brooding  of 
a  tempest.  The  new  commander  instantly  commenced  a  system 
of  discipline  as  near  as  possible  to  that  of  ordinary  law  ; — as 
much  as  possible,  he  avoided,  in  his  own  person,  the  appearance 
of  any  will  or  arbitrary  power  to  vary,  or  to  remit,  punishment. 
The  rules  to  be  observed  were  affixed  to  a  conspicuous  part  of  the 
ship,  with  the  particular  penalties  for  the  breach  of  each  particu 
lar  rule ;  and  care  was  taken  that  every  individual  of  the  ship 
should  know  and  understand  this  code.  With  a  single  exception 
in  the  case  of  mutinous  behavior,  a  space  of  twenty-four  hours 
*  Slightly  altered.— JE&  f  Sir  Alexander  Ball.— Ed. 


158  THE    FRIEND. 

was  appointed  between  the  first  charge  and  the  second  hearing 
of  the  cause,  at  which  time  the  accused  person  was  permitted 
and  required  to  bring  forward  whatever  he  thought  conducive  to 
his  defence  or  palliation.  If,  as  was  commonly  the  case — for  the 
officers  well  knew  that  the  commander  would  seriously  resent  in 
them  all  caprice  of  will,  and  by  no  means  permit  to  others  what 
he  denied  to  himself, — no  answer  could  be  returned  to  the  three 
questions — Did  you  not  commit  the  act  ?  Did  you  not  know  that 
it  was  in  contempt  of  such  a  rule,  and  in  defiance  of  such  a  pun 
ishment  ?  And  was  it  not  wholly  in  your  own  power  to  have 
obeyed  the  one  and  avoided  the  other  ? — the  sentence  was  then 
passed  with  the  greatest  solemnity,  and  another,  but  shorter, 
space  of  time  was  again,  interposed  between  it  and  its  actual  ex 
ecution.  During  this  space  the  feelings  of  the  commander,  as  a 
man,  were  so  well  blended  with  his  inflexibility,  as  the  organ  of 
the  law ;  and  how  much*  he  suffered  previously  to  and  during 
the  execution  of  the  sentence  was  so  well  known  to  the  crew, 
that  it  became  a  common  saying  with  them  when  a  sailor  was 
about  to  be  punished,  the  captain  takes  it  more  to  heart  than  the 
fellow  himself.  But  whenever  the  commander  perceived  any 
trait  of  pride  in  the  offender,  or  the  germs  of  any  noble  feeling, 
he  lost  no  opportunity  of  saying,  "It  is  not  the  pain  that  you  are 
about  to  suffer  which  grieves  me  !  You  are  none  of  you,  I  trust, 
such  cowards  as  to  turn  faint-hearted  at  the  thought  of  that !  but 
that,  being  a  man,  and  one  who  is  to  fight  for  his  king  and  coun 
try,  you  should  have  made  it  necessary  to  treat  you  as  a  vicious 
beast, — it  is  this  that  grieves  me." 

I  have  been  assured,  both  by  a  gentleman  who  was  a  lieuten 
ant  on  board  that  ship  at  the  time  when  the  heroism  of  its  cap 
tain,  aided  by  his  characteristic  calmness  and  foresight,  greatly 
influenced  the  decision  of  the  most  glorious  battle  recorded  in  the 
annals  of  our  naval  history  ;  and  very  recently  by  a  gray-headed 
sailor,  who  did  not  even  know  my  name,  or  could  have  suspected 
that  I  was  previously  acquainted  with  the  circumstances — I  have 
been  assured,  I  say,  that  the  success  of  this  plan  was  such  as  as 
tonished  the  oldest  officers,  and  convinced  the  most  incredulous. 
Ruffians,  who,  like  the  old  Buccaneers,  had  been  used  to  inflict 
torture  on  themselves  for  sport,  or  in  order  to  harden  themselves 
beforehand,  were  tamed  and  overpowered,  how  or  why  they 
themselves  knew  not.  From  the  fiercest  spirits  were  heard  the 


ESSAY    II.  159 

most  earnest  entreaties  for  the  forgiveness  of  their  commander : 
not  before  the  punishment,  for  it  was  too  well  known  that  then 
they  would  have  been  to  no  purpose,  but  days  after  it,  when  the 
bodily  pain  was  remembered  but  as  a  dream.  An  invisible  power 
it  was,  that  quelled  them,  a  power,  which  was  therefore  irresisti 
ble,  because  it  took  away  the  very  will  of  resisting.  It  was  the 
awful  power  of  law,  acting  on  natures  pre-configured  to  its  influ 
ences.  A  faculty  was  appealed  to  in  the  offender's  own  being  :  a 
faculty  and  a  presence,  of  which  he  had  not  been  previously 
made  aware, — but  it  answered  to  the  appeal ;  its  real  existence 
therefore  could  not  be  doubted,  or  its  reply  rendered  inaudible  ; 
and  the  very  struggle  of  the  wilder  passions  to  keep  uppermost 
counteracted  their  own  purpose,  by  wasting  in  internal  contest 
that  energy  which  before  had  acted  in  its  entireness  on  external 
resistance  or  provocation.  Strength  may  be  met  with  strength  ; 
the  power  of  inflicting  pain  may  be  baffled  by  the  pride  of  endur 
ance  ;  the  eye  of  rage  may  be  answered  by  the  stare  of  defiance, 
or  the  downcast  look  of  dark  and  revengeful  resolve  ;  and  with 
all  this  there  is  an  outward  and  determined  object  to  which  the 
mind  can  attach  its  passions  and  purposes,  and  bury  its  own  dis 
quietudes  in  the  full  occupation  of  the  senses.  But  who  dares 
struggle  with  an  invisible  combatant, — with  an  enemy  which 
exists  and  makes  us  know  its  existence — but  where  it  is,  we  ask 
in  vain  ? — No  space  contains  it — time  promises  no  control  over 
it — it  has  no  ear  for  my  threats — it  has  no  substance,  that  my 
hands  can  grasp,  or  my  weapons  find  vulnerable — it  commands 
and  can  not  be  commanded — it  acts  and  is  insusceptible  of  my 
reaction — the  more  I  strive  to  subdue  it,  the  more  am  I  compel 
led  to  think  of  it — and  the  more  I  think  of  it,  the  more  do  I  find 
it  to  possess  a  reality  out  of  myself,  and  not  to  be  a  phantom  of 
my  own  imagination  ;  that  all,  but  the  most  abandoned  men, 
acknowledge  its  authority,  and  that  the  whole  strength  and  ma 
jesty  of  my  country  are  pledged  to  support  it ;  and  yet  that  for 
me  its  power  is  the  same  with  that  of  my  own  permanent  self, 
and  that  all  the  choice,  which  is  permitted  to  me,  consists  in 
having  it  for  my  guardian  angel  or  my  avenging  fiend  !  This  is 
the  spirit  of  law  !  the  lute  of  Amphion,  the  harp  of  Orpheus  ! 
This  is  the  true  necessity,  which  compels  man  into  the  social 
state,  now  and  always,  by  a  still-beginning,  never-ceasing,  force 
of  moral  cohesion. 


160  THE    FRIEND. 

Thus  is  man  to  be  governed,  and  thus  only  can  he  be  gov 
erned.  For  from  his  creation  the  objects  of  his  senses  were  to 
become  his  subjects,  and  the  task  allotted  to  him  was  to  subdue 
the  visible  world  within  the  sphere  of  action  circumscribed  by 
those  senses,  as  far  as  they  could  act  in  concert.  What  the  eye 
beholds,  the  hand  strives  to.  reach  ;  what  it  reaches,  it  conquers, 
and  makes  ^he  instrument  of  further  conquest.  We  can  be  sub 
dued  by  that  alone  which  is  analogous  in  kind  to  that  by  which 
we  subdue  :  therefore  by  the  invisible  powers  of  our  nature, 
whose  immediate  presence  i%  disclosed  to  our  "iifner  sense,  and 
only  as  the  symbols  and  languag^  of'vwiich  all  shapes  and  modi 
fications  of  matter  become  formidable  to  us. 

A  machine  continues  to  move  by  the  force  which  first  set  it  in 
motion.  If  only  the  smallest  number  in  any  state,  properly  so 
called,  hold  together  through  the  influence  of  any  fear  that  does 
not  itself  pre-suppose  the  sense  of  duty,  it  is  evident  that  the 
state  itself  could  not  have  commenced  through  animal  fear.  We 
hear,  indeed,  of  conquests  ;  but  how  does  history  represent  these  ? 
Almost  without  exception  as  the  substitution  of  one  set  of  gover 
nors  for  another  :  and  so  far  is  the  conqueror  from  relying  on  fear 
alone  to  secure  the  obedience  of  the  conquered,  that  his  first  step 
is  to  demand  an  oath  of  fealty  from  them,  by  which  he  would 
impose  upon  them  the  belief,  that  they  become  subjects  ;  for  who 
would  think  of  administering  an  oath  to  a  gang  of  slaves  ?  But 
what  can  make  the  difference  between  slave  and  subject,  if  not 
the  existence  of  an  implied  contract  in  the  one  case,  and  not  in 
the  other  ?  And  to  what  purpose  would  a  contract  serve,  if, 
however  it  might  be  entered  into  through  fear,  it  were  deemed 
binding  only  in  consequence  of  fear  ?  To  repeat  my  former  illus- 
tration-^-where  fear  alone  is  relied  on,  as  in  a  slave  ship,  the 
chains  that  bind  the  poor  victims  must  be  material  chains  :  for 
these  only  can  act  upon  feelings  which  have  their  source  wholly 
in  the  material  organization.  Hobbes  has  said,  that  laws  with 
out  the  sword  are  but  bits  of  parchment.  How  far  this  is  true, 
every  honest  man's  heart  will  best  tell  him,  if  he  will  content 
himself  with  asking  his  own  heart,  and  not  falsify  the  answer  by 
his  notions  concerning  the  hearts  of  other  men.  But  were  it 
r  true,  still  the  fair  answer  would  be — Well !  but  without  the  laws 
*  the  sword  is  but  a  piece  of  iron.  The  wretched  tyrant,  who  dis 
graces  the  present  age  and  human  nature  itself,  had  exhausted 


ESSAY    II.  *  161 

the  whole  magazine  of  animal  terror,  in  order  to  consolidate  his 
truly  Satanic  government.  But  look  at  the  new  French  cate 
chism,  and  in  it  read  the  misgivings  of  his  mind,  as  to  the  suf 
ficiency  of  terror  alone !  The  system,  which  I  have  been  confut 
ing,  is  indeed  so  inconsistent  with  the  facts  revealed  to  us  by  our 
own  mind,  and  so  utterly  unsupported  by  any  facts  of  history, 
that  I  should  be  censurable  in  wasting  my  own  time  and  my 
reader's  patience  by  the  exposure  of  its  falsehood,  but  that  the 
arguments  adduced  have  a  value  of  themselves  independently  of 
their  present  application.  Else  it  would  have  been  an  ample 
and  satisfactory  reply  to  an  assertor  of  this  bestial  theory — Gov 
ernment  is  a  thing  which  relates  to  men,  and  what  you  say 
applies  only  to  beasts.  • 

Before  I  proceed  to  the  second  of  these  systems,  let  me  remove 
a  possible  misunderstanding  that  may  have  arisen  from  the  use 
of  the  word  contract :  as  if  I  had  asserted,  that  the  whole  duty 
of  obedience  to  governors  is  derived  from,  and  dependent  on,  the 
fact  of  an  original  contract.  I  freely  admit,  that  to  make  thiiT 
the  cause  and  origin  of  political  obligation,  is  not  only  a  danger 
ous  but  an  absurd  theory  ;  for  what  could  give  moral  force  to  the 
contract  ?  The  same  sense  of  duty  which  binds  us  to  keep  it, 
must  have  pre-existed  as  impelling  us  to  make  it.  For  what 
man  in  his  senses  would  regard  the  faithful  observation  of  a 
contract  entered  into  to  plunder  a  neighbor's  house,  but  as  a  tre 
ble  crime  ?  First  the  act,  which  is  a  crime  of  itself ;  secondly, 
the  entering  into  a  contract  which  it  is  a  crime  to  observe,  and 
yet  a  weakening  of  one  of  the  main  pillars  of  human  confidence 
not  to  observe,  and  thus  voluntarily  placing  ourselves  under  the 
necessity  of  choosing  between  two  evils  ; — and  thirdly,  the  crime 
of  choosing  the  greater  of  the  two  evils,  by  the  unlawful  observ 
ance  of  an  unlawful  promise.  But  in  my  sense,  the  word  con- 
/tract  is  merely  synonymous  with  the  sense  of  duty  acting  in  a 
I  specific  direction,  that  is,  determining  our  moral  relations,  as 
'members  of  a  body  politic.  If  I  have  referred  to  a  supposed  ori 
gin  of  government,  it  has  been  in  courtesy  to  a  common  notion  : 
for  I  myself  regard  the  supposition  as  no  more  than  a  means  of 
simplifying  to  our  apprehension  the  ever-continuing  causes  pj^so- 
cial  union,  even  as  the  conversation  of  the  world  may  be  repre 
sented  as  an  act  of  continued  creation.  For,  what  if  an  original 
contract  had  really  been  entered  into,  and  formally  recorded  ? 


162  THE    FKIEND. 

Still  it  could  do  no  more  than  bind  the  contracting  parties  to  act 
for  the  general  good  in  the  best  manner,  that  the  existing  rela 
tions  among  themselves  (state  of  property,  religion,  and  so  forth), 
on  the  one  hand,  and  the  external  circumstances  on  the  other 
(ambitious  or  barbarous  neighbors,  and  the  like),  required  or  per 
mitted.  In  after-times  it  could  be  appealed  to  only  for  the 
general  principle,  and  no  more,  than  the  ideal  contract,  could  it 
affect  a  question  of  ways  and  means.  As  each  particular  age 
brings  with  it  its  own  exigencies,  so  must  it  rely  on  its  own 
prudence  for  the  specific  measures  by  which  they  are  to  be  en 
countered. 

Nevertheless,  it  assuredly  can  not  be  denied,  that  an  original, 
— more  accurately,  an  ever-originating, — contract  is  a  very  natu 
ral  and  significant  mode  of  expressing  the  reciprocal  duties  of 
subject  and  sovereign.  We  need  only  consider  the  utility  of  a 
real  and  formal  state  contract, — the  Bill  of  Rights  for  instance, 
— as  a  sort  of  est  demonstratum  in  politics  ;  and  the  contempt 
lavished  on  this  notion,  though  sufficiently  compatible  with  the 
tenets  of  a  Hume,  will  seem  strange  to  us  in  the  writings  of  a 
Protestant  clergyman,*  who  surely  owed  some  respect  to  a  mode 
of  thinking  which  God  himself  had  authorized  by  his  own  exam 
ple,  in  the  establishment  of  the  Jewish  constitution.  In  this  in 
stance  there  was  no  necessity  for  deducing  the  will  of  God  from 
the  tendency  of  the  laws  to  the  general  happiness  :  his  will  was 
expressly  declared.  Nevertheless,  it  seemed  good  to  the  divine 
wisdom,  that  there  should  be  a  covenant,  an  original  contract, 
between  himself  as  sovereign,  and  the  Hebrew  nation  as  subjects. 
This  I  admit  was  a  written  and  formal  contract ;  but  the  rela 
tions  of  mankind,  as  members  of  a  body  spiritual,  or  religious 
commonwealth,  to  the  Saviour,  as  its  head  or  regent ; — is  not 
this,  too,  styled  a  covenant,  though  it  would  be  absurd  to  ask  for 
the  material  instrument  that  contained  it,  or  the  time  when  it 
was  signed  or  voted  by  the  members  of  the  church  collectively.! 

*  See  Paley's  Moral  and  Political  Philosophy.     B.  vi.  c.  3. — Ed. 

f  It  is  perhaps  to  be  regretted,  that  the  words,  Old  and  New  Testament, 
— they  having  lost  the  sense  intended  by  the  translators  of  the  Bible, — 
have  not  been  changed  into  the  Old  and  New  Covenant.  We  can  not  too 
carefully  keep  in  sight  a  notion,  which  appeared  to  the  Primitive  Church 
the  fittest  and  most  scriptxiral  mode  of  representing  the  sum  of  the  contents 
of  the  sacred  writings. 


ESSAY    III.  163 

With  this  explanation,  the  assertion  of  an  original  or  a  per 
petual  contract  is  rescued  from  all  rational  objection  ;  and  how 
ever  speciously  it  may  be  urged,  that  history  can  scarcely  pro 
duce  a  single  example  of  a  state  dating  its  primary  establishment 
from  a  free  and  mutual  covenant,  the  answer  is  ready  :  if  there 
be  any  difference  between  a  government  and  a  band  of  robbers, 
an  act  of  consent  must  be  supposed  on  the  part  of  the  people 
governed. 


ESSAY    III. 

Human  institutions  can  not  be  wholly  constructed  on  principles  of  sci 
ence,  which  is  proper  to  immutable  objects.  In  the  government  of  the  vis 
ible  world  the  Supreme  Wisdom  itself  submits  to  be  the  author  of  the  bet 
ter  ;  not  of  the  best,  but  of  the  best  possible  in  the  subsisting  relations. 
Much  more  must  all  human  legislators  give  way  to  many  evils  rather  than 
encourage  the  discontent  that  would  lead  to  worse  remedies.  If  it  is  not  in 
the  power  of  man  to  construct  even  the  arch  of  a  bridge  that  shall  exactly 
correspond  in  its  strength  to  the  calculations  of  geometry,  how  much  less 
can  human  science  construct  a  constitution  except  by  rendering  itself  flexi 
ble  to  experience  and  expediency :  where  so  many  things  must  fall  out  ac 
cidentally,  and  come  not  into  any  compliance  with  the  preconceived  ends : 
but  men  are  forced  tolgwnply  subsequently,  and  to  strike  in  with  things  as 
they  fall  out,  by  afterilpplications  of  them  to  their  purposes,  or  by  framing 
their  purposes  to  them.  SOUTH. 

THE  second  system  corresponds  to  the  second  point  of  view 
under  which  the  human  being  may  be  considered,  namely,  as  an 
•"animal  gifted  with  understanding,  or  the  faculty  of  suiting  meas 
ures  to  circumstances.  According  to  this  theory,  every  institu 
tion  of  national  origin  needs  no  other  justification  than  a  proof, 
that  under  the  particular  circumstances  it  is  expedient.  Having 
in  my  former  essays  expressed  myself, — so  at  least  I  am  conscious 
I  shall  have  appeared  to  do  to  many  persons  ; — with  comparative 
slight  of  the  understanding  considered  as  the  sole  guide  of  human 
conduct,  and  even  with  something  like  contempt  and  reprobation 
of  the  maxims  of  expedience,  when  represented  as  the  only  steady 
light  of  the  conscience,  and  the  absolute  foundation  of  all  moral 
ity  ;  I  shall  perhaps  gfeem  guilty  of  an  inconsistency,  in  declaring 
myself  an  adherent  of  this  second  system,  a  zealous  advocate  for 


164  THE    FRIEND. 

deriving  the  various  forms  and  modes  of  government  from  human 
prudence,  and  of  deeming  that  to  be  just  which  experience  has 
proved  to  be  expedient.  From  this  charge  of  inconsistency*  I 
shall  best  exculpate  myself  by  the  full  statement  of  the  third  sys 
tem,  and  by  the  exposition  of  its  grounds  and  consequences. 

*  Distinct  notions  do  not  suppose  different  things.     When  I  make  a  three 
fold  distinction  in  human  nature,  I  am  fully  aware,  that  it  is  a  distinction, 
not  a  division,  and  that  in  every  act  of  mind  the  man  unites  the  properties 
of  sense,  understanding,  and  reason.     Nevertheless  it  is  of  great  practical 
importance,  that  these  distinctions  should  be  made  and  understood,  the  ig 
norance  or  perversion  of  them  being  alike  injurious ;  as  the  first  French 
constitution  has  most  lamentably  proved     It  was  the  fashion  in  the  profli 
gate  times  of  Charles  II.  to  laugh  at  the  Presbyterians,  for  distinguishing 
between  the  person  and  the  king ;  while  in  fact  they  were  ridiculing  the 
most  venerable  maxims  of  English  law ; — the  king  never  dies — the  king  can 
do  no  wrong, — and  subverting  the  principles  of  genuine  loyalty,  in  order  to 
prepare  the  minds  of  the  people  for  despotism. 

Under  the  term' "sense,"  I  comprise  whatever  is  passive  in  our  being, 
without  any  reference  to  the  question  of  materialism  or  immaterialism ; 
all  that  man  is  in  common  with  animals,  in  kind  at  least — his  sensations, 
and  impressions,  whether  of  his  outward  senses,  or  the  inner  sense  of  im 
agination.  This,  in  the  language  of  the  schools,  was  called  the  vis  receptiva, 
or  recipient  property  of  the  soul,  from  the  original  constitution  of  which 
we  perceive  and  imagine  all  things  under  the  forms  of  space  and  time.  By 
the  "  understanding,"  I  mean  the  faculty  of  thinking  and  forming  judgments 
on  the  notices  furnished  by  the  sense,  according  to  certain  rules  existing  in 
itself,  which  rules  constitute  its  distinct  nature.  iQf  the  pure  "  reason,"  I 
mean  the  power  by  which  we  become  possessed  of  principles, — the  eternal 
verities  of  Plato  and  Descartes,  and  of  ideas,  not  images — as  the  ideas  of  a 
point,  a  line,  a  circle,  in  mathematics  ;*  and  of  justice,  holiness,  free-will, 
and  the  like,  in  morals.  Hence  in  works  of  pure  science  the  definitions  of 
necessity  precede  the  reasoning,  in  other  works  they  more  aptly  form  the 
conclusion. 

To  many  of  my  readers  it  will,  I  trust,  be  some  recommendation  of  these 
distinctions,  that  they  are  more  than  once  expressed,  and  everywhere  sup 
posed,  in  the  writings  of  St.  Paul.  I  have  no  hesitation  in  undertaking  to 
prove,  that  every  heresy  which  has  disquieted  the  Christian  Church,  from 
Tritheism  to  Socinianism,  has  originated  in  and  supported  itself  by  argu 
ments  rendered  plausible  only  by  the  confusion  of  these  faculties,  and  thus 
demanding  for  the  objects  of  one,  a  sort  of  evidence  appropriated  to  those 
of  another  faculty. — These  disquisitions  have  the  misfortune  of  being  in  ill- 
report,  as  dry  and  unsatisfactory ;  but  I  hope,  in  the  course  of  the  work,  to 
gain  them  a  better  character — and  if  elucidations  of  their  practical  impor- 

*  In  the  severity  of  logic,  the  geometrical  point,  line,  surface,  circle,  and 
so  forth,  are  theorems,  not  ideas. 


ESSAY    III.  165 

The  third  and  last  system,  then,  denies  all  rightful  origin  to 
government,  except  as  far  as  it  is  derivable  from  principles  con 
tained  in  the  reason  of  man,  and  judges  all  the  relations  of  man 
in  society  by  the  laws  of  moral  necessity,  according  to  ideas.  I 
here  use  the  word  in  its  highest  and  primitive  'sense,  and  as  nearly 
synonymous  with  the  modern  word  ideal, — according  to  arche 
typal  ideas  co-essential  with  the  reason,  the  consciousness  of  these 
ideas  being  indeed  the  sign  and  necessary  product  of  the  full 
development  of  the  reason.  The  following  then  is  the  funda 
mental  principle  of  this  theory  :  Nothing  is  to  be  deemed  rightful 
in  civil  society,  or  to  be  tolerated  as  such,  but  what  is  capable  of 
being  demonstrated  out  of  the  original  laws  of  the  pure  reason. 
Of  course,  as  there  is  but  one  system  of  geometry,  so  according  to 
this  theory  there  can  be  but  one  constitution  and  one  system  of 
legislation,  and  this  consists  in  the  freedom,  which  is  the  common 
right  of  all  men,  under  the  control  of  that  moral  necessity,  which 
is  the  common  duty  of  all  men.  Whatever  is  not  everywhere 
necessary,  is  nowhere  right.  On  this  assumption  the  whole 
theory  is  built.  To  state  it  nakedly  is  to  confute  it  satisfactorily. 
So  at  least  it  should  seem.  But  in  how  winning  arid  specious  a 
manner  this  system  may  be  represented  even  to  minds  of  the 
loftiest  order,  if  undisciplined  and  unhumbled  by  practical  experi 
ence,  has  been  proved  by  the  general  impassioned  admiration  and 
momentous  effects  of  Rousseau's  Du  Contrat  Social,  and  the 
writings  of  the  French  economists,  or,  as  they  more  appropriately 
entitled  themselves,  physiocratic  philosophers  :  and  in  how  tempt 
ing  and  dangerous  a  manner  it  may  be  represented  to  the  popu 
lace,  has  been  made  too  evident  in  our  own  country  by  the  tem 
porary  effects  of  Paine's  Rights  of  Man.  Relatively,  however,  to 
this  latter  work  it  should  be  observed,  that  it  is  not  a  legitimate 
offspring  of  any  one  theory,  but  a  confusion  of  the  immortality  of 
the  first  system  with  the  misapplied  universal  principles  of  the 

tance  from  the  most  momentous  events  of  history,  can  render  them  interest 
ing,  to  give  them  that  interest  at  least.  Besides,  there  is  surely  some  good 
in  the  knowledge  of  truth,  as  truth — we  were  not  made  to  live  by  bread 
alone — and  in  the  strengthening  of  the  intellect.  It  is  an  excellent  remark 
of  Scaliger's — Harum  indagatio  subtilitatum,  etsi  non  eat  utilis  ad  machinas 
farinarias  conftciendas,  exuit  animwn  tamen  inscitifc  rubigine,  acuitque  ad 
alia. — Exerc.  5307.  §§  3.  The  investigation  of  these  subtleties,  though  of  no 
use  to  the  construction  of  machines  for  grinding  corn,  yet  clears  the  mind 
from  the  rust  of  ignorance,  and  sharpens  it  or  other  things. 


166  THE    FRIEND. 

last  :  and  in  this  union,  or  rather  lawless  alternation,  consists  the 
essence  of  Jacobinism,  as  far  as  Jacobinism  is  any  thing  but  a 
term  of  abuse,  or  has  any  meaning  of  its  own  distinct  from 
democracy  and  sedition. 

A  constitution  equally  suited  to  China  and  America,  or  to 
Russia  and  Great  Britain,  must  surely  be  equally  unfit  for  both, 
and  deserve  as  little  respect  in  political,  as  a  quack's  panacea  in 
medical,  practice.  Yet  there  are  three  weighty  motives  for  a  dis 
tinct  exposition  of  this  theory,*  and  of  the  ground  on  which  its 
pretensions  are  bottomed  :  and  I  dare  affirm,  that  for  the  same 
reasons  there  are  few  subjects  which  in  the  present  state  of  the 
world  have  a  fairer  claim  to  the  attention  of  every  serious  English 
man,  who  is  likely,  directly  or  indirectly,  as  partisan  or  as  oppo 
nent,  to  interest  himself  in  schemes  of  reform. 

The  first  motive  is  derived  from  the  propensity  of  mankind  to 
mistake  the  abhorrence  occasioned  by  the  unhappy  effects  or  ac 
companiments  of  a  particular  system  for  an  insight  into  the  false 
hood  of  its  principles.  And  it  is  the  latter  only,  a  clear  insight, 
not  any  vehement  emotion,  that  can  secure  its  permanent  rejec 
tion.  For  by  a  wise  ordinance  of  natu*e  our  feelings  have  no 
abiding-place  in  our  memory ;  nay,  the  more  vivid  they  are  in 
the  moment  of  their  existence,  the  more  dim  and  difficult  to  be 
remembered  do  they  make  the  thoughts  which  accompanied 
them.  Those  of  my  readers,  who  at  any  time  of  their  life  have 
been  in  the  habit  of  reading  novels,  may  easily  convince  them 
selves  of  this  truth,  by  comparing  their  recollections  of  those 
stories  which  most  excited  their  curiosity,  and  even  painfully 
affected  their  feelings,  with  their  recollections  of  the  calm  and 
meditative  pathos  of  Shakspeare  and  Milton.  Hence  it  is  that 
human  experience,  like  the  stern  lights  of  a  ship  at  sea,  illumines 
only  the  path  which  we  have  passed  over.  The  horrors  of  the 
Peasants'  War  in  Germany,  and  the  direful  effects  of  the  Ana 
baptist  tenets,  which  were  only  nominally  different  from  those  of 

*  As  metaphysics  are  the  science  which  determines  what  can,  and  what 
can  not,  be  known  of  being  and  the  laws  of  being,  a  priori, — that  is,  from 
those  necessities  of  the  mind  or  forms  of  thinking,  which,  though  first  re 
vealed  to  us  by  experience,  must  yet  have  pre-existed  in  order  to  make  ex 
perience  itself  possible,  even  as  the  eye  must  exist  previously  to  any  par 
ticular  act  of  seeing,  though  by  sight  only  can  we  know  that  we  have  eyes — 
BO  might  the  philosophy  of  Rousseau  and  his  followers  not  inaptly  be  en 
titled,  metapolitics,  and  the  doctors  of  this  school  metapoliticians 


ESSAY    III.  167 

Jacobinism  by  the  substitution  of  religious  for  philosophical  jar 
gon,  struck  all  Europe  for  a  time  with  affright .  Yet  little  more 
than  a  century  was  sufficient  to  obliterate  all  effective  memory 
of  those  events  :  the  same  principles  budded  forth  anew,  and  pro 
duced  the  same  fruits  from  the  imprisonment  of  Charles  I.  to  the 
restoration  of  his  son.  In  the  succeeding  generations,  to  the 
follies  and  vices  of  the  European  courts,  and  to  the  oppressive 
privileges  of  the  nobility,  were  again  transferred  those  feelings  of 
disgust  and  hatred,  which  for  a  brief  while  the  multitude  had 
attached  to  the  crimes  and  extravagances  of  political  and  reli 
gious  fanaticism  :  and  the  same  principles,  aided  by  circumstances 
and  dressed  out  in  the  ostentatious  garb  of  a  fashionable  philoso 
phy,  once  more  rose  triumphant,  and  effected  the  French  revolu 
tion.  That  man  has  reflected  little  on  human  nature  who  does 
not  perceive  that  the  detestable  maxims  and  correspondent  crimes 
of  the  existing  French  despotism,  have  already  dimmed  the 
recollections  of  the  democratic  phrenzy  in  the  minds  of  men  ;  by 
little  and  little,  have  drawn  off  to  other  objects  the  electric  force 
of  the  feelings,  which  had  massed  and  upholden  those  recollec 
tions  ;  and  that  a  favorable  concurrence  of  occasions  is  alone 
wanting  to  awaken  the  thunder  and  precipitate  the  lightning 
from  the  opposite  quarter  of  the  political  heaven.  The  true 
origin  of  human  events  is  so  little  susceptible  of  that  kind  of  evi 
dence  which  can  compel  our  belief  even  against  our  will ;  and  so 
many  are  the  disturbing  forces  which  modify  the  motion  given  by 
the  first  projection;  and  every  age  has,  or  imagines  it  has,  its 
own  circumstances  which  render  past  experience  no  longer  ap 
plicable  to  the  present  case  ;  that  there  will  never  be  wanting 
answers  and  explanations,  and  specious  flatteries  of  hope.  I  well 
remember,  that  when  the  examples  of  former  Jacobins,  Julius 
Caesar,  Cromwell,  &c.  were  adduced  in  France  and  England  at 
the  commencement  of  the  French  Consulate,  it  was  ridiculed  as 
pedantry  and  pedants'  ignorance,  to  fear  a  repetition  of  such 
usurpation  at  the  close  of  the  enlightened  eighteenth  century. 
Those  who  possess  the  Moniteurs  of  that  date  will  find  set  proofs, 
that  such  results  were  little  less  than  impossible,  and  that  it  was 
an  insult  to  so  philosophical  an  age,  and  so  enlightened  a  nation, 
to  dare  direct  the  public  eye  towards  them  as  lights  of  admoni 
tion  and  warning. 

It  is  a  common  weakness  with  official  statesmen,  and  with 


168  THE    FKIEND. 

those  who  deem  themselves  honored  by  their  acquaintance,  to  at 
tribute  great  national  events  to  the  influence  of  particular  per 
sons,  to  the  errors  of  one  man  and  to  the  intrigues  of  another,  to 
any  possible  spark  of  a  particular  occasion,  rather  than  to  the 
true  cause,  the  predominant  state  of  public  opinion.  I  have 
known  men  who,  with  most  significant  nods,  and  the  civil  con 
tempt  of  pitying  half-smiles,  have  declared  the  natural  explana 
tion  of  the  French  revolution,  to  be  the  mere  fancies  of  garreteers, 
and  then,  with  the  solemnity  of  cabinet  ministers,  have  pro 
ceeded  to  explain  the  whole  by  anecdotes.  It  is  so  stimulant  to 
the  pride  of  a  vulgar  mind,  Hb  be  persuaded  that  it  knows  what 
few  others  know,  and  that  it  is  the  important  depository  of  a  sort 
af  state  secret,  by  communicating  which  it  confers  an  obligation 
on  others !  But  I  have  likewise  met  with  men  of  intelligence, 
who  at  the  commencement  of  the  revolution  were  travelling  on 
foot  through  the  French  provinces,  and  they  bear  witness,  that  in 
the  remotest  villages  every  tongue  was  employed  in  echoing  and 
enforcing  the  doctrines  of  the  Parisian  journalists  ;  that  the  public 
highways  were  crowded  with  enthusiasts,  some  shouting  the 
watchwords  of  the  revolution,  others  disputing  on  the  most  ab 
stract  principles  of  the  universal  constitution,  which  they  fully 
believed,  that  all  the  nations  of  the  earth  were  shortly  to  adopt ; 
the  most  ignorant  among  them  confident  of  his  fitness  for  the 
highest  duties  of  a  legislator  ;  and  all  prepared  to  shed  their 
blood  in  the  defence  of  the  inalienable  sovereignty  of  the  self-gov 
erned  people.  The  more  abstract  the  notions  were,  with  the  closer 
affinity  did  they  combine  with  the  most  fervent  feelings,  and  all 
the  immediate  impulses  to  action.  The  Lord  Chancellor  Bacon 
lived  in  an  age  of  court  intrigues,  and  was  familiarly  acquainted 
with  all  the  secrets  of  personal  influence.  He,  if  any  man,  was 
qualified  to  take  the  gauge  and  measurement  of  their  comparative 
power  ;  and  he  has  told  us,  that  there  is  one,  and  but  one  infalli 
ble  source  of  political  prophecy,  the  knowledge  of  the  predomi 
nant  opinions  and  the  speculative  principles  of  men  in  general, 
between  the  age  of  twenty  and  thirty.  Sir  Philip  Sidney, — the 
favorite  of  Glueen  Elizabeth,  the  paramount  gentleman  of  Europe, 
the  nephew,  and — as  far  as  a  good  man  could  be — the  confidant 
of  the  intriguing  and  dark-minded  Earl  of  Leicester, — was  so 
leeply  convinced  that  the  principles  diffused  through  the  majority 
Df  a  nation  are  the  true  oracles  from  whence  statesmen  are  to 


ESSAY    III. 

learn  wisdom,  and  that  when  the  people  speak  loudly  it  is  from 
their  being  strongly  possessed  either  by  the  godhead  or  the  daemon, 
that  in  the  revolution  of  the  Netherlands  he  considered  the  uni 
versal  adoption  of  one  set  of  principles,  as  a  proof  of  the  divine 
presence.  '  If  Her  Majesty,'  says  he,  '  were  the  fountain,  I  would 
ii>ar,  considering  what  I  daily  find,  that  we  should  wax  dry. 
But  she  is  but  a  means  which  God  useth.'  But  if  my  readers 
wish  to  see  the  question  of  the  efficacy  of  principles  and  popular 
opinions  for  evil  and  for  good  proved  and  illustrated  with  an  elo 
quence  worthy  of  the  subject,  I  can  refer  them  with  the  hardiest 
anticipation  of  their  thanks  to  the  late  work  concerning  the  rela 
tions  of  Great  Britain,  Spain,  and  Portugal,  by  my  honored  friend, 
William  Wordsworth,  quern  quoties  lego,  non  verba  mihi  videor 
audire,  sed  tonitrua.* 

*  I  consider  this  reference  to,  and  strong*  recommendation  of,  the  work 
above  mentioned,  not  as  a  voluntary  tribute  of  admiration,  but  as  an  act  of 
mere  justice  both  to  myself  and  to  the  readers  of  The  Friend.  My  own 
heart  bears  me  witness,  that  I  am  actuated  by  the  deepest  sense  of  the 
truth  of  the  principles,  which  it  has  been  and  still  more  will  be  my  endeavor 
to  enforce,  and  of  their  paramount  importance  to  the  well-being  of  society 
at  the  present  juncture :  and  that  the  duty  of  making  the  attempt,  and  the 
hope  of  not  wholly  failing  in  it,  are,  far  more  than  the  wish  for  the  doubt 
ful  good  of  Literary  reputation,  or  any  yet  meaner  object,  my  great  and 
ruling  motives.  Mr.  Wordsworth  I  deem  a  fellow-laborer  in  the  same  vine 
yard,  actuated  by  the  same  motives  and  teaching  the  same  principles,  but 
with  far  greater  powers  of  mind,  and  an  eloquence  more  adequate  to  the 
importance  and  majesty  of  the  cause.  I  am  strengthened  too  by  the  knowl 
edge,  that  I  am  not  unauthorized  by  the  sympathy  of  many  wise  and  good 
men,  and  men  acknowledged  as  such  by  the  public,  in  my  admiration  of  his 
pamphlet. — Neque  cnitn  debct  operibus  ejus  obesse,  quod  vivit.  An  si  inter 
eos,  quos  numquam  vidimus,  floruisset,  non  solum  libros  ejus,  verum  etiam 
imagines  conquircremus,  ejusdem  mine  honor  prcesentis,  ct  gratia  quasi 
satietate  languescet  ?  At  hoc  pravum,  malignumquc  est,  non  admirari 
homincm  admiratione  dignissimum,  quia  videre,  alloqtd,  audire,  complecti, 
ncc  laudare  tantum,  vcrum  etiam  amare,  conlingit.  PLIX.  Epis.  Lib.  I.  1C. 

It  is  hardly  possible  for  a  man  of  ingenuous  mind  to  act  under  the  fear 
that  he  shall  be  suspected  by  honest  men  of  the  vileness  of  praising  a  work 
to  the  public,  merely  because  he  happens  to  be  personally  acquainted  with 
the  author.  That  this  is  so  commonly  done  in  reviews,  furnishes  only  an 
additional  proof  of  the  morbid  hardness  produced  in  the  moral  sense  by  the 
habit  of  writing  anonymous  criticisms,  especially  under  the  further  disguise 
of  a  pretended  board  or  association  of  critics,  each  man  expressing  himself, 
to  use  the  words  of  Andrew  Marvel,  as  a  synodical  individuum.  With  re 
gard,  however,  to  the  probability  of  being  warped  by  partiality,  I  can  only 

VOL.  II.  H 


170  THE    FRIEND. 

That  erroneous  political  notions — they  having  become  general 
and  a  part  of  the  popular  creed — have  practical  consequences, 
and  these,  of  course,  of  a  most  fearful  nature,  is  a  truth  as  cer 
tain  as  historic  evidence  can  make  it :  and  that  when  the  feel 
ings  excited  by  these  calamities  have  passed  away,  and  the 
interest  in  them  has  been  displaced  by  more  recent  events,  the 
.  same  errors  are  likely  to  be  started  afresh,  pregnant  with  the 
same  calamities,  is  an  evil  rooted  in  human  nature  in  the  pres 
ent  state  of  general  information,  for  which"  we  have  hitherto 
found  no  adequate  remedy.  It  may,  perhaps,  in  the  scheme  of 
Providence,  be  proper  and  conducive  to  its  ends,  that  no  adequate 
remedy  should  exist :  for  the  folly  of  men  is  the  wisdom  of  God. 
But  if  there  be  any  means,  if  not  of  preventing,  yet  of  palliating, 
the  disease,  and,  in  the  more  favored  nations,  of  checking  its 
progress  at  the  first  symptoms  ;  and  if  these  means  are  to  be  at 
all  compatible  with  the  civil  and  intellectual  freedom  of  mankind  ; 
they  are  to  be  found  only  in  an  intelligible  and  thorough  exposure 
of  the  error,  and,  through  that  discovery,  of  the  source,  from 
which  it  derives  its  speciousness  and  powers  of  influence  on  the 
human  mind.  This  therefore  is  my  first  motive  for  undertaking 
the  disquisition. 

The  second  is,  that  though  the  French  code  of  revolutionary 
principles  is  now  generally  rejected  as  a  system,  yet  everywhere 
in  the  speeches  and  writings  of  the  English  reformers,  nay,  not 
seldom  in  those  of  their  opponents,  I  find  certain  maxims  asserted 

say  that  I  judge  of  all  works  indifferently  by  certain  fixed  rules  previously 
formed  in  my  mind  with  all  the  power  and  vigilance  of  my  judgment ;  and 
that  I  should  certainly  of  the  two  apply  them  with  greater  rigor  to  the 
production  of  a  friend  than  to  that  of  a  person  indifferent  to  me.  But 
wherever  I  find  in  any  work  all  the  conditions  of  excellence  in  its  kind,  it  is 
not  the  accident  of  the  author's  being  my  contemporary  or  even  my  friend, 
or  the  sneers  of  bad-hearted  men,  that  shall  prevent  me  from  speaking  of 
it,  as  in  my  inmost  convictions  I  deem  it  deserves. 

— no,  friend  ! 

Though  it  be  now  the  fashion  to  commend, 
•     As  men  of  strong  minds,  those  alone  who  can 
Censure  with  judgment,  no  such  piece  of  man 
Makes  up  my  spirit :  where  desert  does  lire, 
There  will  I  plant  my  wonder,  and  there  give 
My  best  endeavors  to  build  up  his  glory, 
That  truly  merits ! 

Recommendatory  Verses  to  one  of  the  old  plays. 


ESSAY    IV.  171 

or  appealed  to,  which  are  not  tenable,  except  as  constituent 
parts  of  that  system.  Many  of  the  most  specious  arguments  in 
proof  of  the  imperfection  and  injustice  of  the  present  constitution 
of  our  legislature  will  be  found,  on  closer  examination,  to  pre 
suppose  the  truth  of  certain  principles,  from  which  the  adducers 
of  these  arguments  loudly  profess  their  dissent.  But  in  political 
changes  no  permanence  can  be  hoped  for  in  the  edifice,  without 
consistency  in  the  foundation. 

The  third  motive  is,  that  by  detecting  the  true  source  of  the 
influence  of  these  principles,  we  shall  at  the  same  time  discover 
their  natural  place  and  object ;  and  that  in  themselves  they  are 
not  only  truths,  but  most  important  and  sublime  truths  ;  and  thaf 
their  falsehood  and  their  danger  consist  altogether  in  their  mis-" 
application.  Thus  the  dignity  of  human  nature  will  be  secured, 
and  at  the  same  time  a  lesson  of  humility  taught  to  each  indi 
vidual,  when  we  are  made  to  see  that  the  universal  necessary 
laws,  and  pure  ideas  of  reason,  were  given  us,  not  for  the -pur 
pose  of  flattering  our  pride,  and  enabling  us  to  become  national 
legislators  ;  but  that,  by  an  energy  of  continued  self-conquest,  we 
might  estabhsh  a  free  and  yet  absolute  government  in  our  own 
spirits. 


ESSAY   IV. 

Albeit  therefore,  muoh  of  that  we  are  to  speak  in  this  present  cause,  may 
seem'  to  a  number  perhaps  tedious,  perhaps  obscure,  dark,  and  intricate 
(for  many  talk  of  the  truth,  which  never  sounded  the  depth  from  whence  it 
springeth :  and  therefore,  when  they  are  led  thereunto,  they  are  soon 
weary,  as  men  drawn  from  those  beaten  paths,  wherewith  they  have  been 
inured) ;  yet  this  may  not  so  far  prevail,  as  to  cut  off  that  which  the  mat 
ter  itself  requireth,  howsoever  the  nice  humor  of  some  be  therewith  pleased 
or  no.  They  unto  whom  we  shall  seem  tedious,  are  in  no  wise  injured  by 
us,  because  it  is  in  their  own  hands  to  spare  that  labor  which  they  are  not 
willing  to  endure.  And  if  any  complain  of  obscurity,  they  must  consider, 
that  in  these  matters  it  cometh  no  otherwise  to  pass,  than  in  sundry  the 
works  both  of  art,  and  also  of  nature,  where  that  which  hath  greatest  force 
in  the  very  things  we  see,  is,  notwithstanding,  itself  oftentimes  not  seen. 
The  stateliness  of  houses,  the  goodliness  of  trees,  when  we  behold  them,  de- 
lighteth  the  eye :  but  that  foundation  which  beareth  up  the  one,  that  root 
•which  ministereth  unto  the  other  nourishment  and  life,  is  in  the  bosom  of 


172  THE    FRIEND. 

the  earth  concealed ;  and  if  there  be  at  any  time  occasion  to  search  into  it, 
such  labor  is  then  more  necessary  than  pleasant,  both  to  them  which  un 
dertake  it  and  for  the  lookers-on.  In  like  manner,  the  use  and  benefit  of 
good  laws,  all  that  live  under  them,  may.  enjoy  with  delight  and  comfort, 
albeit  the  grounds  and  first  original  causes  from  whence  they  have  sprung, 
be  unknown,  as  to  the  greatest  part  of  men  they  are.  But  when  they  who 
withdraw  their  obedience,  pretend  that  the  laws  which  they  should  obey 
are  corrupt  and  vicious ;  for  better  examination  of  their  quality,  it  behoov- 
eth  the  very  foundation  and  root,  the  highest  well-spring  and  fountain  of 
them  to  be  discovered.  Which,  because  we  are  not  oftentimes  accustomed 
to  do,  when  we  do  it,  the  pains  we  take  are  more  needful  a  great  deal  than 
acceptable,  and  the  matters  which  we  handle,  seem  by  reason  of  newness 
(till  the  mind  grow  better  acquainted  with  them),  dark,  intricate,  and  un 
familiar.  For  as  much  help  whereof,  as  may  be  in  this  case,  I  have  en 
deavored  throughout  the  body  of  this  whole  discourse,  that  every  former 
part  might  give  strength  unto  all  that  follow,  and  every  latter  bring  some 
light  unto  all  before :  so  that  if  the  judgments  of  men  do  but  hold  them 
selves  in  suspense,  as  touching  these  first  more  general  meditations,  till  in 
order  they  have  perused  the  rest  that  eusuc  ;  what  may  seem  dark  at  the. 
first,  will  afterwards  be  found  more  plain,  even  as  the  latter  particular  de 
cisions  will  appear,  I  doubt  not,  more  strong  when  the  other  have  been 
read  before.  HOOKER.* 


ON  THE  GROUNDS  OF  GOVERNMENT  AS  LAID  EXCLUSIVELY  IN  THE 
PURE  REASON  \  OR  A  STATEMENT  AND  CRITIQUE  OF  THE  THIRD 
SYSTEM  OF  POLITICAL  PHILOSOPHY,-;— THE  THEORY  OF  ROUSSEAU 
AND  THE  FRENCH  ECONOMISTS. 

I  PROCEED  to  my  promise  of  developing  from  its  embryo  prin 
ciples  the  tree  of  French  liberty,  of  which  the  declaration  of  the 
rights  of  man,  and  the  constitution  of  1791  \vere  the  leaves,  and 
the  succeeding  and  present  state  of  France  the  fruits.  Let 'me 
not  he  blamed,  if,  in  the  interposed  essays,  introductory  to  this 
section,  I  have  connected  this  system,  though  only  in  imagination, 
though  only  as  a  possible  case,  with  a  name  so  deservedly  rever 
enced  as  that  of  Luther.  It  is  some  excuse,  that  to  interweave 
with  the  reader's  recollections  a  certain  life  and  dramatic  inter 
est,  during  the  perusal  of  the  abstract!  reasonings  that  are  to  fol- 

*  Eccl.  Pol.  B.  I  c.  1,  2.— Ed. 

\  I  have  been  charged  in  The  Friend  with  a  novel  and  perplexing  use  of 
the  word  abstract,  both  as  verb  and  noun.  RTovel  it  certainly  is  not ;  it  be 
ing  authorized  by  Lord  Bacon,  Des  Cartes,  and  others.  The  fact  is  this :  I 
take  the  word  in  its  proper  meaning,  as  abstr'a/io,  I  draw  from.  The  im 
age,  by  which  I  represent  to  myself  an  oak-tree,  is  no  fac  simile  or  ade- 


ESSAY    IV.  173 

low,  is  the  only  means  I  possess  of  bribing  his  attention.  "We 
have,  most  of  us,  at  some  period  or  other  of  our  lives,  been 
amused  with  dialogues  of  the  dead.  Who  is  there,  that  wishing 
to  form  a  probable  opinion  on  the  grounds  of  hope  and  fear  for 
an  injured  people  warring  against,  mighty  armies,  would  not  be 
pleased  with  a  spirited  fiction,  which  brought  before  him  an  old 
Numantian  discoursing  on  that  subject  in  Elysium,  with  a  new 
ly-arrived  spirit  from  the  streets  of  Saragoza  or  the  walls  of 
Gerona  ? 

But  I  have  a  better  reason.  I  wished  to  give  every  fair  ad 
vantage  to  the  opinions,  which  I  deemed  it  of  importance  to 
confute.  It  is  bad  policy  to  represent  a  political  system  as  hav 
ing  no  charm  but  for  robbers  and  assassins,  and  no  natural  origin 
-but  in  the  brains  of  fools  or  madmen,  when  experience  has  proved, 
that  the  great  danger  of  the  system  consists  in  the  peculiar  fas 
cination  it  is  calculated  to  exert  on  noble  and  imaginative  spirits  ; 
on  all  those  who,  in  the  amiable  intoxication  of  youthful  benevo 
lence,  are  apt  to  mistake  their  own  best  virtues  and  choicest 
powers  for  the  average  qualities  and  attributes  of  the  human 
character.  The  very  minds,  which  a  good  man  would  most  wish 
to  preserve  or  disentangle  from  the  snare,  are  by  these  angry 
misrepresentations  rather  lured  into  it.  Is  it  wonderful  that  a 
man  should  reject  the  arguments  unheard,  when  his  own  heart 
proves  the  falsehood  of  the  assumptions  by  which  they  are  pref 
aced  ;  or  that  lie  should  retaliate  on  the  aggressors  their  own 
evil  thoughts  ?  I  am  well  aware,  that  the  provocation  was  great, 
the  temptation  almost  inevitable  ;  yet  still  I  can  not  repel  the 
conviction  from  my  mind,  that  in  part  to  this  error,  and  in  part 
to  a  certain  inconsistency  in  his  own  fundamental  principles,  we 
are  to  attribute  the  small  number  of  converts  made  by  Burke 

quatc  icon  of  the  tree,  but  is  abstracted  from  it  by  my  eye.  Now  this 
appears  to  me  a  more  natural  as  well  as  more  grammatical  and  philosophi 
cal  use  of  the  word,  than  that  elliptic  construction,  by  which  an  accusative 
noun,  and  the  preposition  following  it  are  to  be  understood,  namely,  I 
draw  (my  attention  from)  the,  <tc.  Thus : — I  give  the  outline  of  a  flower 
on  a  slate  with  a  slate  pencil. — Now,  I  would  say,  I  abstract  the  shape 
from  the  flower,  or  of  the  flower.  But  the  objector  would  express  the 
same  thing  by  saying,  I  abstract  the  color,  (fee.  (that  is,  my  attention  from 
the  color,  (tc.) 

Perhaps  the  latter  might  be  better  in  familiar  writing ;  but  I  continue 
to  prefer  the  former  on  subjects  that  require  precision.     1830. 


174:  THE    FRIEND. 

during  his  life-time.  Let  me  not  "be  misunderstood.  I  do  not 
mean,  that  this  great  man  supported  different  principles  at  dif 
ferent  seras  of  his  political  life.  On  the  contrary,  no  man  was 
ever  more  like  himself.  From  his  first  published  speech  on  the 
American  colonies  to  his  last  posthumous  tracts,  we  see  the  same 
man,  the  same  doctrines,  the  same  uniform  wisdom  of  practical 
counsels,  the  same  reasoning  and  the  same  prejudices  against  all 
abstract  grounds,  against  all  deduction  of  practice  from  theory. 
The  inconsistency  to  which  I  allude,  is  of  a  different  kind  ^it  is 
the  want  of  congruity  in  the  principles  appealed  to  in  different 
parts  of  the  same  work  ;  it  is  an  apparent  versatility  of  the  prin 
ciple  with  the  occasion.  If  his  opponents  are  theorists,  then 
every  thing  is  to  be  founded  on  prudence,  on  mere  calculations  of 
expediency  ;  and  every  man  is  represented  as  acting  according 
to  the  state  of  his  own  immediate  self-interest.  Are  his  oppo 
nents  calculators  ?  Then  calculation  itself  is  represented  as  a 
sort  of  crime.  God  has  given  us  feelings,  and  we  are  to  obey 
them  ; — and  the  most  absurd  prejudices  become  venerable,  to 
which  these  feelings  have  given  consecration.  I  have  not  for 
gotten,  that  Burke  himself  defended  these  half-contradictions,  on 
the  pretext  of  balancing  the  too  much  on  the  one  side  by  a  too 
much  on  the  other.  But  never  can  I  believe  but  that  the  straight 
line  must  needs  be  the  nearest ;  and  that  where  there  is  the  most, 
and  the  most  unalloyed  truth,  there  will  be  the  greatest  and  most 
permanent  power  of  persuasion.  '  But  the  fact  was,  that  Burke 
in  his  public  character  found  himself,  as  it  were,  in  a  Noah's  ark, 
with  a  very  few  men,  and  a  great  many  beasts.  He  felt  how 
much  his  immediate  power  was  lessened  by  the  very  circumstance 
of  his  measureless  superiority  to  those  about  him  :  he  acted, 
therefore,  under  a  perpetual  system  of  compromise — a  compro 
mise  of  greatness  with  meanness  ;  a  compromise  of  comprehension 
with  narrowness  ;  a  compromise  of  the  philosopher, — who,  arm 
ed  with  the  twofold  knowledge  of  history  and  the  laws  of  spirit, 
looked,  as  with  a  telescope,  far  around  and  into  the  remote  dis 
tance, — with  the  mere  men  of  business,  or  with  yet  coarser  intel 
lects,  who  handled  a  truth,  which  they  were  required  to  receive, 
as  they  would  handle  an  ox,  which  they  were  desired  to  purchase. 
But  why  need  I  repeat  what  has  been  already  said  in  so  happy 
a  manner  by  Goldsmith  of  this  great  man  : — 


ESSAY    IV.  175 

"Who  too  deep  for  his  hearers,  still  went  on  refining, 
And  thought  of  convincing,  while  they  thought  of  dining.* 

And  if  iii  consequence  it  was  his  fate  to  "  cut  blocks  with  a  razor," 
I  may  be  permitted  to  add,  that  in  respect  of  truth,  though  not 
of  genius,  the  weapon  was  injured  by  the  misapplication. 

For  myself,  however,  I  act  and  will  continue  to  act  under  the 
belief,  that  the  whole  truth  is  the  best  antidote  to  falsehoods, 
which  are  dangerous  chiefly  because  they  are  half-truths  :  and 
that  an  erroneous  system  is  best  confuted,  not  by  an  abuse  of 
theory  in  general,  nor  by  an  absurd  opposition  of  theory  to  prac 
tice,  but  by  a  detection  of  the  errors  in  the  particular  theory. 
For  the  meanest  of  men  has  his  theory,  and  to  think  at  all  is  to 
theorize.  With  these  convictions  I  proceed  immediately  to  the 
system  of  the  economists,  and  to  the  principles  on  which  it  is  con 
structed,  and  from  which  it  must  derive  all  its  strength. 

The  system-  commences  with  an  undeniable  truth,  and  an  im 
portant  deduction  therefrom  equally  undeniable.  All  voluntary 
actions,  say  they,  having  f6^  their  objects,  good  or  evil,  are  moral 
actions.  But  all  morality  is  grounded  in  the  reason.  Every  man 
is  bora  with  the  faculty  of  reason  :  and  whatever  is  without  it,  be 
the  shape  w"hat  it  may,  is  not  a  man  or  person,  but  a  thing. 
•  Hence  the  sacred  principle,  recognized  by  all  laws,  human  and 
divine,  the  principle  indeed,  which  is  the  ground- work  of  all  law 
and  justice,  that  a  person  can  never  become  a  thing,  nor  be 
treated  as  such  without  wrong.  But  the  distinction  between 
person  and  thing  consists  herein,  that  the  latter  may  rightfully  be 
used,  altogether  and  merely,  as  a  mean ;  but  the  former  must 
always  be  included  in  the  end,  and  form  a  part  of  the  final 
cause.  We  plant  the  tree  and  we  cut  it  down,  we1  breed  the 
sheep  and  we  kill  it,  wholly  as  means  to  our  own  ends.  The 
wood-cutter  and  the  hind  are  likewise  employed  as  means,  but  on 
an  agreement  of  reciprocal  advantage,  which  includes  them  as 
well  as  their  employer  in  the  end.  Again  :  as  the  faculty  of 
reason  implies  free-agency,  morality, — that  is,  the  dictate  of  rea 
son, — gives  to  every  rational  being  the  right  of  acting  as  a  free 
agent,  and  of  finally  determining  his  conduct  by  his  own  will, 
according  to  his  own  conscience  :  and  this  right  is  inalienable 
except  by  guilt,  which  is  an  act  of  self-forfeiture,  and  the  consc- 

*  Retaliation.— -JSii 


176  THE    FKIEND. 

quences  therefore  to  be  considered  as  the  criminal's  own  mora] 
.  election.  In  respect  of  their  reason*  all  men  are  equal.  The 
measure  of  the  understanding  and  of  all  other  faculties  of  man, 
is  different  in  different  persons  :  but  reason  is  not  susceptible  of 
degree.  For  since  it  merely  decides  whether  any  given  thought 
or  action  is  or  is  not  in  contradiction  with  the  rest,  there  can  be 
no  reason  better,  or  more  reason,  than  another. 

Reason  !  best  and  holiest  gift  of  God  and  bond  of  union  with 
the  giver  ; — the  high  title  by  which  the  majesty  of  man  claims 
precedence  above  all  other  living  creatures  ; — mysterious  faculty, 
the  mother  of  conscience,  of  language,  of  tears,  and  of  smiles  ; — 
calm  and  incorruptible  legislator  of  the  soul,  without  whom  all 
its  other  powers  would  '  meet  in  mere  oppugnancy  ;' — sole  prin 
ciple  of  permanence  amid  endless  change, — in  a  world  of  discord 
ant  appetites  and  imagined  self-interests  the  one  only  common 
measure,  which  taken  away, — 

Force  should  be  right ;  or,  rather  right  and  wrong,— 

Between  whose  endless  jar  justly  resides, — ; 

Should  lose  their  names,  and  so  should  justice,  too. 

Then  every  thing  includes  itself  in  power, 

Power  into  will,  will  into  appetite  ;  * 

And  appetite  a  universal  wolf, 

So  doubly  seconded  with  will  and  power, 

Must  make  perforce  a  universal  prey  ! 

Thrice  blessed  faculty  of  reason  !  all  other  gifts,  though  goodly 
and  of  celestial  origin,  health,  strength,  talents,  all  the  powers' 
and  all  the  means  of  enjoyment,  seem  dispensed  by  chance  or  sul 
len  caprice  ; — thou  alone,  more  than  even  the  sunshine,  more 
than  the  common  air,  art  given  to  all  men,  and  to  every  man 
alike.  To  thee,  who  being  one  art  the  same  in  all,  we  owe  the 
privilege,  that  of  all  we  can  become  one,  a  living  whole, — that 
we  have  a  country.  Who  then  shall  dare  prescribe  a  law  of 
moral  action  for  any  rational  being,  which  does  not  flow  imme 
diately  from  that  reason,  which  is  the  fountain  of  all  morality  ? 
Or  how  without  breach  of  conscience  can  we  limit  or  coerce  the 
powers  of  a  free  agent,  except  by  coincidence  with  that  law  in 
his  own  mind,  which  is  at  once  the  cause,  the  condition,  and  the 

*  This  position  has  been  already  explained,  and  the  sophistry  grounded 
on  it  detected  and  exposed,  in  Essay  V.  of  the  First  Landing-Pi  ace.  II.  pp, 
143-150. 


ESSAY    IV.  17.7 

measure  of  his  free  agency  ?  Man  must  be  free ;  or  to  what 
purpose  was  lie  made  a  spirit  of  reason,  and  not  a  machine  of 
instinct  ?  Man  must  obey  ;  or  wherefore  has  he  a  conscience  ft 
The  powers,  which  create  this  difficulty,  contain  its  solution 
likewise  :  for  their  service  is  perfect  freedom.  And  whatever 
law  or  system  of  law  compels  any  other  service,  disennobles  our 
nature,  leagues  itself  with  the  animal  against  the  god-like,  kills 
in  us  the  very  principle  of  joyous  well-doing,  and  fights  against 
humanity. 

By  the  application  of  these  principles  to  the  social  state  there 
arises  the  following  system,  which,  as  far  as  its  first  grounds  are 
concerned,  is  developed  the  most  fully  by  J.  J.  Rousseau  in  his 
work  Du  Contrat  Social.  If  then  no  individual  possesses  the 
right  of  prescribing  any  thing  to  another  individual,  the  r«le  of 
which  is  not  contained  in  their  common  reason,  society,  which  is 
but  an  aggregate  of  individuals,  can  communicate  this  right  to 
no  one.  It  can  not  possibly  make  that  rightful  which  the  higher 
and  inviolable  law  of  human  nature  declares  contradictory  and 
unjust.  But  concerning  right  and  wrong,  the  reason  of  each  and 
every  man  is  the  competent  judge  :  for  how  else  could  he  be  an 
amenable  being,  or  the  proper  subject  of  any  law  ?  This  reason, 
therefore,  in  any  one  man,  can  not  even  in  the  social  state  be 
rightfully  subjugated  to  the  reason  of  any  other.  Neither  an  in 
dividual,  nor  yet  the  whole  multitude  which  constitutes  the  state, 
can  possess  the  right  of  compelling  him  to  do  any  thing,  of  which 
it  can  not  be  demonstrated  that  his  own  reason  must  join  in  pre 
scribing  it.  If  therefore  society  is  to  be  under  a  rightful  consti-  / 
tution  of  government,  and  one  that  can  impose  on  rational  beings 
a  true  and  moral  obligation  to  obey  it,  it  must  be  framed  on  such 
principles  that  every  individual  follows  his  own  reason  while  he 
obeys  the  laws  of  the  constitution,  and  performs  the  will  of  the 
state  while  he  follows  the  dictates  of  his  own  reason.  This  is 
expressly  asserted  by  Rousseau,  who  states  the  problem  of  a  per 
fect  constitution  of  government  in  the  following  words  :  trouver 
line  forme  d1  association — -par  laquelle  cliacun  s'unissant  atous, 
ti'obeisse  pourtant  qy}  d  lui  memc,  ct  reste  aussi  libre  qi<?  aupa- 
ravant, — that  is,  to  find  a  form  of  society  according  to  which 
each  one  uniting  himself  with  the  whole  shall  yet  obey  himself 
only  and  remain  as  free  as  before.  This  right  of  the  individual*' 
to  retain  his  whole  natural  independence,  even  in  the  social  state, 

H* 


178  THE    FRIEND. 

is  absolutely  inalienable.  He  can  not  possibly  concede  or  compro 
mise  it :  for  this  very  right  is  one  of  his  most  sacred  duties.  He 
would  sin  against  himself,  and  commit  high  treason  against  the 
reason  which  the  Almighty  Creator  has  given  him,  if  he  dared 
abandon  its  exclusive  right  to  govern  his  actions. 

Laws  obligatory  on  the  conscience,  can  only  therefore  proceed 
from  that  reason  which  remains  always  one  and  the  same, 
whether  it  speaks  through  this  or  that  person :  like  the  voice  of 
an  external  ventriloquist,  it  is  indifferent  from  whose  lips  it  ap 
pears  to  come,  if  only  it  be  audible.  The  individuals  indeed  are 
subject  to  errors  and  passions,  and  each  man  has  his  own  defects. 
But  when  men  are  assembled  in  person  or  by  real  representatives, 
the  actions  and  reactions  of  individual  self-love  balance  each 
othe» ;  errors  are  neutralized  by  opposite  errors ;  and  the  winds 
rushing  from  all  quarters  at  once  with  equal  force,  produce  for 
the  time  a  deep  calm,  during  which  the  general  will  arising  from 
the  general  reason  displays  itself.  '  It  is  fittest,'  says  Burke  him 
self,*  '  that  sovereign  authority  should  be  exercised  where  it  is 
most  likely  to  be  attended  with  the  most  effectual  correctives. 
These  correctives  are  furnished  by  the  nature  and  course  of  par 
liamentary  proceedings,  and  by  the  infinitely  diversified  charac 
ters  which  compose  the  two  Houses.  The  fulness,  the  freedom, 
and  publicity  of  discussion,  leave  it  easy  to  distinguish  what  are 
acts  of  power,  and  what  the  determinations  of  equity  and  reason. 
There  prejudice  corrects  prejudice,  and  the  different  asperities  of 
party  zeal  mitigate  and  neutralize  each  other.' 

This,  however,  as  my  readers  will  have  already  detected,  is 
no  longer  a  demonstrable  deduction  from  reason.  It  is  a  mere 
probability,  against  which  other  probabilities  may  be  weighed : 
;is  the  lust  of  authority,  the  contagious  nature  of  enthusiasm,  and 
other  of  the  acute  or  chronic  diseases  of  deliberative  assemblies. 
But  which  of  these  results  is  the  more  probable,  the  correction  or 
Hie  contagion  of  evil,  must  depend  on  circumstances  and  grounds 
of  expediency  :  and  thus  we  already  find  ourselves  beyond  the 
magic  circle  of  the  pure  reason,  and  within  the  sphere  of  the  un 
derstanding  and  the  prudence.  Of  this  important  fact  Rousseau 
was  by  no  means  unaware  in  his  theory,  though  with  gross  in 
consistency  he  takes  no  notice  of  it  in  his  application  of  the  the- 

*  Note  oil  his  motion  relative  to  the  Speech  from  the  Throne,  vol.  ii.  p, 
647,  4to  Edit. 


ESSAY    IV.  179 

ory  to  practice.  He  admits  the  possibility,  he  is  compelled  by 
history  to  allow  even  the-  probability,  that  the  most  numerous 
popular  assemblies,  nay  even  whole  nations,  may  at  times  be 
hurried  away  by  the  same  passions,  and  under  the  dominion  of  a 
common  error.  -This  will  of  all  is  then  of  no  more  value,  than 
the  humors  of  any  one  individual  :  and  must  therefore  be  sacred 
ly  distinguished  from  the  pure  will  which  flows  from  universal 
reason.  To  this  point  then  I  entreat  the  reader's  particular  at 
tention  :  for  in  this  distinction,  established  by  Rousseau  himself, 
between  the  volonte  de  tous  and  the  volonte  generale, — that  is, 
between  the  collective  will,  and  a  casual  overbalance  of  wills — 
the  falsehood  or  nothingness  of  the  whole  system  becomes  mani 
fest.  For  hence  it  follows,  as  an  inevitable  consequence,  that  all 
which  is  said  in  the  Contmt  Social  of  that  sovereign  will,  to  1 
which  the  right  of  universal  legislation  appertains,  applies  to  no  r 
one  human  being,  to  no  society  or  assemblage  of  human  beings,  \ 
and  least  of  all  to  the  mixed  multitude  that  makes  up  the  peo 
ple  :  but  entirely  and  exclusively  to  reason  itself,  which,  it  is 
true,  dwells  in  every  rnan  potentially,  but  actually  arid  in  per 
fect  purity  is  found  in  no  man  and  in  no  body  of  men.  This  dis— 
tinction  the  latter  disciples  of  Rousseau  chose  completely  to  for 
get,  and, — a  far  more  melancholy  case — the  constituent  legisla 
tors  of  France  forgot  it  likewise.  "With  a  wretched  parrotry  they 
wrote  and  harangued  without  ceasing  of  the  rolonte  generale — 
the  inalienable  sovereignty  of  the  people  :  and  by  these  high- 
sounding  phrases  led  on  the  vain,  ignorant,  and  intoxicated  pop 
ulace  to  wild  excesses  and  wilder  expectations,  which  entailing 
on  them  the  bitterness  of  disappointment  cleared  the  way  for 
military  despotism,  for  the  Satanic  government  of  horror  under 
the  Jacobins,  and  of  terror  under  the  Corsican. 

Luther  lived  long  enough  to  see  the  consequences  of  the  doc 
trines  into  which  indignant  pity  and  abstract  principles  of  right 
had  hurried  him — to  see,  to  retract  and  to  oppose  them.  If  the 
same  had  been  the  lot  of  Rousseau,  I  doubt  not,  that  his  conduct 
would  have  been  the  same.  In  his  whole  system  there  is  beyond 
controversy  much  that  is  true  and  well  reasoned,  if  only  its  ap 
plication  be  not  extended  farther  than  the  nature  of  the  case  per 
mits.  But  then  we  shall  find  that  little  or  nothing  is  won  by  it 
for  the  institutions  of  society  ;  and  least  of  all  for  the  constitution 
of  governments,  the  theory  of  which  it  was  his  wish  to  ground 


180  THE    FRIEND. 

on  it.  Apply  his  principles  to  any  case,  in  which  the  sacred  and 
inviolable  laws  of  morality  are  immediately  interested,  all  be 
comes  just  and  pertinent.  No  power  on  earth  can  oblige  me  to 
act  against  my  conscience.  No  magistrate,  no  monarch,  no  legis 
lature,  can  without  tyranny  compel  me  to  do  any  thing  which  the 
acknowledged  laws  of  God  have  forbidden  me  to  do.  So  act  that 
thou  rnayest  be  able,  without  involving  any  contradiction,  to  will 
that  the  maxim  of  thy  conduct  should  be  the  law  of  all  intelli 
gent  beings — is  the  one  universal  and  sufficient  principle  and 
guide  of  morality.^  And  why  ?  Because  the  object  of  morality 
is  not  the  outward  act,  but  the  internal  maxim  of  our  actions. 
And  so  far  it  is  infallible.  But  with  what  show  of  reason  can 
we  pretend,  from  a  principle  by  which  we  are  to  determine  the 
purity  of  our  motives,  to  deduce  the  form  and  matter  of  a  right 
ful  government,  the  main  office  of  which  is  to  regulate  the  out 
ward  actions  of  particular  bodies  of  men,  according  to  their  par 
ticular  circumstances  ?  Can  we  hope  better  of  constitutions 
framed  by  ourselves,  than  of  that  which  was  given  by  Almighty 
Wisdom  itself?  The  laws  of  the  Hebrew  commonwealth,  which 
flowed  from  the  pure  reason,  remain  and  are  immutable  ;  but  the 
regulations  dictated  by  prudence,  though  by  the  divine  prudence, 
and  though  given  in  thunder  from  the  mount,  have  passed  away ; 
arid  while  they  lasted,  were  binding  only  for  that  one  state,  the 
particular  circumstances  of  which  rendered  them  expedient. 

Rousseau  indeed  asserts,  that  there  is  an  inalienable  sovereignty 
inherent  in  every  human  being  possessed  of  reason  :  and  from 
this  the  framers  of  the  constitution  of  17&1  deduce,  that  the  peo 
ple  itself  is  its  own  sole  rightful  legislator,  and  at  most  dare  only 
recede  so  far  from  its  right  as  to  delegate  to  chosen  deputies  the 
power  of  representing  and  declaring  the  general  will.  But  this 
is  wholly  without  proof ;  for  it  has  already  been  fully  shown,  that 
according  to  the  principle  out  of  which  this  consequence  is  at 
tempted  to  be  drawn,  it  is  not  the  actual  man,  but  the  abstract 
reason  alone,  that  is  the  sovereign  and  rightful  lawgiver.  The 
confusion  of , two  things  so  different  is  so  gross  an  error,  that  the 
Constituent  Assembly  could  scarcely  proceed  a  step  in  their  decla 
ration  of  rights,  without  some  glaring  inconsistency.  Children 
are  excluded  from  all  political  power  ; — are  they  not  human 

*  Kant's  Grundlegung  zur  Meiaphysifc  dcr  Kitten,  pp.  46,  47. 
18S8.    Am.  Ed. 


ESSAY   IT.  .  181 

beings  in  whom  the  faculty  of  reason  resides  ?  Yes  !  but  in 
them  the  faculty  is  not  yet  adequately  developed.  But  are  not 
gross  ignorance,  inveterate  superstition,  and  the  habitual  tyranny 
of  passion  and  sensuality,  equally  preventives  of  the  development, 
equally  impediments  to  the  rightful  exercise,  of  the  reason,  as 
childhood  and  early  youth?  Who  would  not  rely  on  the  judg- 
ment  of  a  well-educated  English  lad,  bred  in  a  virtuous  and  en 
lightened  family,  in  preference  to  that  of  a  brutal  Russian,  who 
believes  that  he  can  scourge  his  wooden  idol  into  good-humor, 
or  attributes  to  himself  the  merit  of  perpetual  prayer,  when  he 
has  fastened  the  petitions,  which  his  priest  has  written  for  him, 
on  the  wings  of  a  windmill  ? — Again  :  women  are  likewise  ex 
cluded — a  full  half,  and  that  assuredly  the  most  innocent,  the 
most  amiable  half,  of  the  whole  human  race,  is  excluded,  and 
this  too  by  a  constitution  which  boasts  to  have  no  other  foun 
dations  but  those  of  universal  reason  !  Is  reason  then  an  affair 
of  sex  ?  No  !  But  women  are  commonly  in  a  state  of  depen 
dence,  and  are  not  likely  to  exercise  their  reason  with  freedom. 
"Well  !  and  does  not  this  ground  of  exclusion  apply  with  equal 
or  greater  force  to  the  poor,  to  the  infirm,  to  men  in  embarrassed 
circumstances,  to  all  in  short  whose  maintenance,  be  it  scanty 
or  be  it  ample,  depends  on  the  will  of  others  ?  How  far  are  we 
to  go  ?  Where  must  we  stop  ?  What  classes  should  we  admit  ? 
Whom  must  we  disfranchise  ?  The  objects  concerning  whom 
we  are  to  determine  these  questions,  are  all  human  beings,  and 
differenced  from  each  other  by  degrees  only,  these  degrees,  too, 
oftentimes  changing.  Yet  the  principle  on  which  the  whole  sys 
tem  rests  is,  that  reason  is  not  susceptible  of  degree.  Nothing, 
therefore,  which  subsists  wholly  in  degrees,  the  changes  of  which 
do  not  obey  any  necessary  law,  can  be  subjects  of  pure  science, 
or  determiriable  by  mere  reason.  For  these  things  we  must  rely 
on  our  understandings,  enlightened  by  past  experience  and  im 
mediate  observation,  and  determining  our  choice  by  comparisons 
of  expediency. 

It  is  therefore  altogether  a  mistaken  notion,  that  the  theory 
which  would  deduce  the  social  rights  of  man,  and  the  sole  right 
ful  form  of  government  from  principles  of  reason,  involves  a  ne 
cessary  preference  of  the  democratic,  or  even  the  representative, 
constitutions.  Accordingly,  several  of  the  French  economists, 
although  devotees  of  Rousseau  and  the  physiocratic  system,  and 


182  THE    FPTTEND. 

assuredly  not  the  least  respectable  of  their  party  either  in  morals 
or  in  intellect, — and  these,  too,  men  who  lived  and  wrote  under 
the  limited  monarchy  of  France,  and  who  were  therefore  well 
acquainted  with  the  evils  connected  with  that  system, — did  yet 
declare  themselves  for  a  pure  monarchy  in  preference  to  the  aris 
tocratic,  the  popular,  or  the  mixed  form.  These  men  argued, 
that  no  other  laws  being  allowable  but  those  which  are  demon- 
strably  just,  and  founded  in  the  simplest  ideas  of  reason,  and  of 
which  every  man's  reason  is  the  competent  judge,  it  is  indiffer 
ent  whether  one  man,  or  one  or  more  assemblies  of  men,  give 
form  and  publicity  to  them.  For  being  matters  of  pure  and 
simple  science,  they  require  no  experience  in  order  to  see  their 
truth  ;  and  among  an  enlightened  people,  by  whom  this  system 
had  been  once  solemnly  adopted,  no  sovereign  would  dare  to  make 
other  laws  than  those  of  reason.  They  further  contend,  that  if 
the  people  were  not  enlightened,  a  purely  popular  government 
could  not  co-exist  with  this  system  of  absolute  justice  :  and  if  it 
were  adequately  enlightened,  the  influence  of  public  opinion  would 
supply  the  place  of  formal  representation,  while  the  form  of  the 
government  would  be  in  harmony  with  the  unity  and  simplicity 
of  its  principles.  This  they  entitle  le  despotisme  legal  sous  I' em 
pire  dc  I' evidence.  The  best  statement  of  the  theory  thus  modi 
fied,  may  be  found  in  Mercier  dc  la  Riviere,  Vordre  naturel  ct 
essentiel  dcs  societes  politiqucs.  From  the  proofs  adduced  in 
the  preceding  paragraph,  to  which  many  others  might  be  added, 
I  have  no  hesitation  in  affirming"  that  this  latter  party  are  the 
more  consistent  reasoners. 

It  is  worthy  of  remark,  that  the  influence  of  these  writings 
contributed  greatly,  not  indeed  to  raise  the  present  emperor,  but 
certainly  to  reconcile  a  numerous  class  of  politicians  to  his  un 
limited  authority  :  and  as  far  as  his  lawless  passion  for  war  and 
conquest  allows  him  to  govern  according  to  any  principles,  he 
favors  those  of  the  physiocratic  philosophers.  His  early  educa 
tion  must  have  given  him  a  predilection  for  a  theory  conducted 
throughout  with  mathematical  precision  ;  its  very  simplicity 
promised  the  readiest  and  most  commodious  machine  for  despot 
ism,  for  it  moulds  a  nation  into  as  calculable  a  power  as  an  army  ; 
while  the  stern  and  seeming  greatness  of  the  whole,  and  its  mock 
elevation  above  human  feelings,  flattered  his  pride,  hardened  his 
conscience,  and  aided  the  efforts  of  self-delusion.  Reason  is  the 


ESSAY    IV.  183 

sole  sovereign,  the  only  rightful  legislator :  but  reason  to  act  on 
man  must  be  impersonated.  The  Providence  which  had  so  mar-- 
vellously  raised  and  supported  him,  had  marked  him  out  for  the 
representative  of  reason,  and  had  armed  him  with  irresistible 
force,  in  order  to  realize  its  laws.  In  him,  therefore,  might  be 
comes  right,  arid  his  cause  and  that  of  destiny  (or,  as  he  now 
chooses  to  word  it,  exchanging  blind  nonsense  for  staring  blas 
phemy),  his  cause  and  the  cause  of  God  are  one  and  the  same. 
Excellent  postulate  for  a  choleric  and  self-willed  tyrant  !  What 
avails  the  impoverishment  of  a  few  thousand  merchants  and 
manufacturers  ?  What  even  the  general  wretchedness  of  mil 
lions  of  perishable  men,  for  a  short  generation  ?  Should  these 
stand  in  the  way  of  the  chosen  conqueror,  the  innovator  mundi, 
et  stupor  sceculorum,  or  prevent  a  constitution  of  things,  which 
erected  on  intellectual  and  perfect  foundations  groweth  not  old, 
but  like  the  eternal  justice,  of  which  it  is  the  living  image, 


-may  despise 


The  strokes  of  fate,  aud  see  the  world's  last  hoijr  ? 

For  justice,  austere,  unrelenting  justice,  is  everywhere  holden 
up  as  the  one  thing  needful ;  and  the  only  duty  of  the  citizen,  in 
fulfilling  which  he  obeys  all  the  laws,  is  not  to  encroach  on 
another's  sphere  of  action.  The  greatest  possible  happiness  of  a 
people  is  not,  according  to  this  system,  the  object  of  a  governor  ; 
but  to  preserve  the  freedom  of  all,  by  coercing  within  the  requi 
site  bounds  the  freedom  of  each.  Whatever  a  government  does 
more  than  this,  comes  of  evil  :  and  its  best  employment  is  the  re 
peal  of  laws  and  regulations,  not  the  establishment  of  them. 
Each  man  is  the  best  judge  of  his  own  happiness,  and  to  himself 
must  it  therefore  be  intrusted.  Remove  all  the  interferences  of 
positive  statutes,  all  monopoly,  all  bounties,  all  prohibitions,  and 
all  encouragements  of  importation  and  exportation,  of  particular 
growth  and  particular  manufactures  :  let  the  revenues  of  the 
state  be  taken  at  once  from  the  produce  of  soil ;  and  all  things  will 
then  find  their  level,  all  irregularities  will  correct  each  other, 
and  an  indestructible  cycle  of  harmonious  motions  take  place  in 
the  moral  equally  as  in  the  natural  world.  The  business  of  the 
governor  is  to  watch  incessantly,  that  the  state  shall  remain  com 
posed  of  individuals,  acting  as  individuals,  by  which  alone  the 
freedom  of  all  can  be  secured.  Its  duty  is  to  take  care  that  itself 


184  THE    FRIEND. 

remain  the  sole  collective  power,  and  that  all  the  citizens  should 
enjoy  the  same  rights,  and  without  distinction  be  subject  to  the 
same  duties. 

Splendid  promises  !  Can  any  thing  appear  more  equitable 
than  the  last  proposition,  the  equality  of  rights  and  duties  ?  Can 
any  thing  be  conceived  more  simple  in  the  idea  ?  But  the  exe 
cution —  !  Let  the  four  or  five  quarto  volumes  of  the  Conscript 
Code  be  the  comment  !  But  as  briefly  as  possible  I  shall  prove, 
that  this  system,  as  an  exclusive  total,  is  under  any  form  imprac 
ticable  ;  and  that  if  it  were  realized,  and  as  far  as  it  were  real 
ized,  it  would  necessarily  lead  to  general  barbarism  and  the  most 
grinding  oppression ;  and  that  the  final  result  of  a  general  at 
tempt  to  introduce  it,  must  be  a  military  despotism  inconsistent 
with  the  peace  and  safety  of  mankind.  That  reason  should  be 
our  guide  and  governor  is  an  undeniable  truth,  arid  all  our  notion 
of  right  and  wrong  is  built  thereon  :  for  reason  is  one  of  the  two 
fountain-heads  in  which  the  whole  moral  nature  of  man  origi 
nated  and  subsists.  From  reason  alone  can  we  derive  the  prin 
ciples  which  our  understandings  are  to  apply,  the  ideal  to  which 
by  means  of  our  understandings  we  should  endeavor  to  approxi 
mate.  This,  however,  gives  no  proof  that  reason  alone  ought  to 
govern  and  direct  human  beings,  either  as  individuals  or  as  states. 
It  ought  not  to  do  this,  because  it  can  not.  The  laws  of  reason 
•are  unable  to  satisfy  the  first  conditions  of  human  society.  We 
will  admit  that  the  shortest  code  of  the  law  is  the  laest,  and  that 
the  citizen  finds  himself  most  at  ease  where  the  government 
least  intermeddles  with  his  affairs,  and  confines  its  efforts  to  the 
preservation  of  public  tranquillity  ;  we  will  suffer  this  to  pass  at 
present  undisputed,  though  the  examples  of  England,  and  before 
the  late  events,  of  Holland  and  Switzerland, — surely  the  three 
happiest  nations  of  the  world — to  which  perhaps  we  might  add 
the  major  part  of  the  former  German  free  towns,  furnish  stubborn 
facts  in  presumption  of  the  contrary, — yet  still  the  proof  is  want 
ing  that  the  first  and  most  general  applications  and  exertions  of 
the  power  of  man  can  be  definitely  regulated  by  reason  unaided 
by  the  positive  and  conventional  laws  in  the  formation  of  which 
the  understanding  must  be  our  guide,  and  which  become  just  be 
cause  they  happen  to  be  expedient. 

The  chief  object  for  which  men  first  formed  themselves  into  a 
state  was  not  the  protection  of  their  lives,  but  of  their  property 


ESSAY    IV.  1§5 

Where  the  nature  of  the  soil  and  climate  precludes  all  property 
but  personal,  and  permits  that  only  in  its  simplest  forms,  as  in 
Greenland,  men  remain  in  the- domestic  state  and  form  neighbor 
hoods,  but  riot  governments.  And  in  North  America  the  chiefs 
appear  to  exercise  government  in  those  tribes  only  which  possess 
individual  landed  property.  Among  the  rest  the  chief  is.  their 
general ;  but  government  is  exercised  only  in  families  by  the  fa 
thers  of  families.  But  where  individual  landed  property  exists, 
there  must  be  inequality  of  property  .«•  the  nature  of  the  earth  and 
the  nature  of  the  mind  unite  to  make  the  contrary  impossible. 
But  to  suppose  the  land  the  property  of  the  state,  and  the  labor 
and  the  produce  to  be  equally  divided  among  all  the  members  of 
the  state,  involves .  more  than  one  contradiction :  for  it  could  not 
subsist  without  gross  injustice,  except  where  the  reason  of  all  and 
of  each  was  absolute  master  of  the  selfish  passions  of  sloth,  envy, 
and  the  like  ;  and  yet  the  same  state  would  preclude  the  greater 
part  of  the  means  by  which  the  reason  of  man  is  developed.  In 
whatever  state  of  society  you  would  place  it,  from  the  most  sav 
age  to  the  most  refined,  it  would  be  found  equally  unjust  and  im 
possible  ;  and  were  there  a  race  of  men,  a  country,  and  a  climate, 
that  permitted  such  an  order  of  things,  the  same  causes  would 
render  all  government  superfluous. 

To  property,  therefore,  and  to  its  inequalities  all  human  laws 
directly  or  indirectly  relate,  which  would  not  be  equally  laws  in 
the  state  of  nature.  Now  it  is  impossible  to  deduce  the  right  of 
property*  from  pure  reason.  The  utmost  which  reason  could 
give  would  be  a  property  in  the  forms  of  things,  as  far  as  the  forms 
were  produced  by  individual  power.  In  the  matter  it  could  give 
no  property.  "We  regard  angels  and  glorified  spirits  as  beings  of 
pure  reason  :  and  who  ever  thought  of  property  in  heaven  ?  Even 
the  simplest  and  most  moral  form  of  it,  namely,  marriage  (we 
know  from  the  highest  authority),  is  excluded  from  the  state  of 
pure  reason.  Rousseau  himself  expressly  admits  that  property 
can  not  be  deduced  Irom  the  laws  of  reason  and  nature ;  and  he 
ought  therefore  to  have  admitted  at 'the  same  time  that  his  whole 
theory  was  a  thing  of  air.  In  the  most  respectable  point  of  view 

*  I  moan,  practically  and  with  the  inequalities  inseparable  from  the  ac 
tual  existence  of  property.  Abstractedly,  the  right  to  property  is  deduci- 
ble  from  the  free-agency  of  man.  If  to  act  freely  be  a  right,  a  sphere  of 
action  must  be  so  too. 


186  THE    FRIEND. 

he  could  regard  his  system  as  analogous  to  geometry.  If  indeed 
'it  be  purely  scientific,  how  could  it  be  otherwise?  Geometry 
"  holds  forth  an  ideal  which  can  never  be  fully  realized  in  nature, 
even  because  it  is  nature  ;  because  bodies  are  more  than  exten 
sion,  and  to  pure  extension  of  space  only  the  mathematical 
theorems  wholly  correspond.  In  the  same  manner  the  moral 
laws  of  the  intellectual  world,  as  far  as  they  are  deducible  from 
pure  intellect-,  are  never  perfectly  applicable  to  our  mixed  and 
sensitive  nature,  because  man  is  something  besides  reason  ;  be 
cause  his  reason  never  acts  by  itself,  but  must  clothe  itself  in  the 
substance  of  individual  understanding  and  specific  inclination,  in 
order  to  become  a  reality  and  an  object  of  consciousness  and  ex 
perience.  It  will  be  seen  hereafter  that  together  with  this,  the 
key-stone  of  the  arch,  the  greater  part  and  the  most  specious  of 
the  popular  arguments  in  favor  of  universal  suffrage  fall  in  and 
are  crushed.  I  will  mention  one  only  at  present.  Major  Cart- 
wright, — in  his  deduction  of  the  rights  of  the  subject  from  prin 
ciples  "  not  susceptible  of  proof,  being  self-evident,  if  one  of  which 
be  violated  all  are  shaken," — affirms  (Principle  98th  ;  though 
the  greater  part  indeed  are  moral  aphorisms  or  blank  assertions, 
not  scientific  principles)  "  that  a  power  which  ought  never  to  be 
used  ought  never  to  exist."  Again  he  affirms  that  "  laws  to  bind 
all  must  be  assented  to  by  all,  and  consequently  every  man,  even 
the  poorest,  has  an  equal  right  to  suffrage  ;"  and  this  for  an  ad 
ditional  reason,  because  "  all  without  exception  are  capable  of 
feeling  happiness  or  misery,  accordingly  as  they  are  well  or  ill 
governed."  But  are  they  not  then  capable  of  feeling  happiness 
or  misery  accordingly  as  they  do  or  do  not  possess  the  means  of 
a  comfortable  subsistence  ?  and  who  is  the  judge,  what  is  a  com 
fortable  subsistence,  but  the  man  himself?  Might  not  then,  on 
the  same  or  equivalent  principles,  a  leveller  construct  a  right  to 
equal  property  ?  The  inhabitants  of  this  country  without  proper 
ty  form,  doubtless,  a  great  majority  ;  each  of  these  has  a  right  to 
a  suflrage,  and  the  richest  man  to  no  more  ;  and  the  object  of 
this  suffrage  is,  that  each  individual  may  secure  himself  a  true 
efficient  representative  of  his  will.  Here  then  is  a  legal  power 
of  abolishing  or  equalizing  property  :  and  according  to  Major  C. 
himself,  a  power  which  ought  never  to  be  used  ought  not  to  exist. 
Therefore,  unless  he  carries  his  system  to  the  whole  length  of 
common  labor  and  common  possession,  a  right  to  universal  suf- 


ESSAY    V.  187 

frage  can  not  exist  ;  but  if  not  to  universal  suffrage,  there  can 
exist  no  natural  right  to  suffrage  at  all.  In  whatever  way  he 
would  obviate  this  objection,  he  must  admit  expedience  founded 
on  experience  and  particular  circumstances,  which  will  vary  in 
every  different  nation,  and  in  the  same  nation  at  different  times, 
as  the  maxim  of  all  legislation  and  the  ground  of  all  legislative 
power.  For  his  universal  principles,  as  far  as  they  are  principles 
and  universal,  necessarily  suppose  uniform  and  perfect  subjects, 
which  are  to  be  found  in  the  ideas  of  pure  geometry  and,  I  trust, 
in  the  realities  of  heaven,  but  never,  never,  in  creatures  of  flesh 
and  blood. 


ESSAY    V. 

ON  THE   ERRORS   OF   PARTY   SPIRIT:    OR   EXTREMES   MEET. 

And  it  was  no  wonder  if  some  good  and  innocent  men,  especially  such  as 
he  (Lightfoot)  who  was  generally  more  concerned  about  what  was  done  in 
Judea  many  centuries  ago,  than  what  was  transacted  in  his  own  time  in  his 
own  country — it  is  no  wonder  if  some  such  were  for  a  while  borne  away 
to  the  approval  of  opinions  which  they,  after  more  sedate  reflection,  dis 
owned.  Yet  his  innocency  from  any  self-interest  or  design,  together  with 
his  learning,  secured  him  from  the  extravagances  of  demagogues,  the  peo 
ple's  oracles. — LIGHTFOOT'S  Works,  Publisher's  Preface  to  the  Reader. 

I  HAVE  never  seen  Major  Cartwright,  much  less  enjoy  the 
honor  of  his  acquaintance  ;  but  I  know  enough  of  his  character, 
from  the  testimony  of  others  and  from  his  own  writings,  to  re 
spect  his  talents,  and  revere  the  purity  of  his  motives.  I  am 
fully  persuaded  that  there  are  few  better  men,  few  more  fervent 
or  disinterested  adherents  of  their  country  or  the  laws  of  their 
country,  of  whatsoever  things  are  lovely,  of  whatsoever  things 
are  honorable.  It  would  give  me  great  pain  should  I  be  sup 
posed  to  have  introduced,  disrespectfully,  a  name,  which  from 
my  early  youth  I  never  heard  mentioned  without  a  feeling  of 
affectionate  admiration.  I  have  indeed  quoted  from  this  vener 
able  patriot,  as  from  the  most  respectable  English  advocate  for 
the  theory,  which  derives  the  rights  of  government,  and  the 
duties  of  obedience  to  it,  exclusively  from  principles  of  pure 


188  THE    FKIEND. 

reason.  It  was  of  consequence  to  my  cause  that  I  should  not  be 
thought  to  have  been  waging  war  against  a  straw  image  of  my 
own  setting  up,  or  even  against  a  foreign  idol  that  had  neither 
worshipers  nor  advocates  in  our  own  country  ;  and  it  was  not 
less  my  object  to  keep  my  discussion  aloof  from  those  passions, 
which  more  unpopular  names  might  have  excited.  I  therefore 
introduced  the  name  of  Cartwright,  as  I  had  previously  done 
that  of  Luther,  in  order  to  give  every  fair  advantage  to  a  theory, 
which  I  thought  it  of  importance  to  confute  ;  and  as  an  instance 
that  though  the  system  might  be  made  tempting  to  the  vulgar, 
yet  that,  taken  unmixed  and  entire,  it  was  chiefly  fascinating  for 
lofty  and  imaginative  spirits,  who  mistook  their  own  virtues  and 
powers  for  the  average  character  of  men  in  general. 

Neither  by  fair  statements  nor  by  fair  reasoning  should  I  ever 
give  offence  to  Major  Cartwright  himself,  nor  to  his  judicious 
friends.  If  I  am  in  danger  of  offending  them,  it  must  arise  from 
one  or  other  of  two  causes  ;  either  that  I  have  falsely  represented 
his  principles,  or  his  motives  and  the  tendency  of  his  writings. 
In  the  book  from  which  I  quoted,  "  The  People's  Barrier  against 
undue  Influence"  (the  only  one  of  Major  Cartwright's  which  I 
possess),  I  am  conscious  that  there  are  six  foundations  stated  of 
constitutional  government.  Therefore,  it  may  be  urged,  the 
author  can  not  be  justly  classed  with  those  who  deduce  our  social 
rights  and  correlative  duties  exclusively  from  principles  of  pure 
reason,  or  unavoidable  conclusions  from  such.  My  answer  is 
ready.  Of  these  six  foundations  three  are  but  different  words 
for  one  and  the  same,  namely,  the  law  of  reason,  the  law  of 
God,  and  first  principles  :  and  the  three  that  remain  can  not  be 
taken  as  indifferent,  inasmuch  as  they  are  afterwards  affirmed 
to  be  of  no  validity  except  as  far  as  they  are  evidently  deduced 
from  the  former  ;  that  is,  from  the  principles  implanted  by  God 
in  the  universal  reason  of  man.  These  three  latter  foundations 
are,  the  general  customs  of  the  realm,  particular  customs,  and 
acts  of  Parliament.  It  might  be  supposed  that  the  author  had 
not  used  his  terms  in  the  precise  and  single  sense  in  which  they 
are  defined  in  my  former  essay  ;  and  that  self-evident  principles 
may  be  meant  to  include  the  dictates  of  manifest  expedience,  the 
inductions  of  the  understanding  as  well  as  the  prescripts  of  the 
pure  reason.  But  no  ;  Major  Cartwright  has  guarded  against 
the  possibility  of  this  interpretation,  and  has  expressed  himself 


ESSAY    V.  180 

as  decisively,  an<}  with  as  much  warmth,  against  founding  gov 
ernments  on  grounds  of  expedience,  as  I  have  done  against 
founding  morality  on  the  same.  Euclid  himself  could  not  have 
defined  his  words  more  sternly  within  the  limits  of  pure  science  ; 
for  instance,  see  the  1st,  2d,  3d,  and  4th  primary  rules  : — '  A 
principle  is  a  manifest  arid  simple  proposition  comprehending 
a  certain  truth.  Principles  are  the  proof  of  every  thing  :  but 
are  not  susceptible  of  external  proof,  being  self-evident.  If  one 
principle  be  violated,  all  are  shaken.  Against  him,  who  de 
nies  principles,  all  dispute  is  useless,  and  reason  unintelligible, 
or  disallowed,  so  far  as  he  denies  them.  The  laAvs  of  nature  are 
immutable.' — Neither  could  Rousseau  himself,  nor  his  predeces 
sors,  the  Fifth-monarchy  men,  have  more  nakedly  or  emphati 
cally  identified  the  foundations  of  government  in  the  concrete 
with  those  of  religion  and  morality  in  the  abstract  :  see  Major 
Cartwright's  primary  rules  from  31  to  39,  and  from  44  to  83. 
In  these  it  is  affirmed  ; — that  the  legislative  rights  of  every  citi 
zen  are  inherent  in  his  nature  ;  that,  being  natural  rights,  they 
must  be  equal  in  all  men  ;  that  a  natural  right  is  that  right 
which  a  citizen  claims  as  being  a  man,  and  that  it  hath  no  other 
foundation  but  his  personality  or  reason;  that  property  can 
neither  increase  nor  modify  any  legislative  right ;  that  every  one 
man  shall  have  one  vote  however  poor,  and  for  any  one  man, 
however  rich,  to  have  more  than  one  vote,  is  against  natural 
justice,  and  an  evil  measure  ;  that  it  is  better  for  a  nation  to 
endure  all  adversities,  than  to  assent  to  one  evil  measure  ;  that 
to  be  free  is  to  be  governed  by  laws,  to  which  we  have  ourselves 
assented,  either  in  person  or  by  representative,  for  whose  election 
we  have  actually  voted  :  that  all  not  having  a  right  of  suffrage 
are  slaves,  and  that  a  vast  majority  of  the  people  of  Great  Brit 
ain  are  slaves  !  To  prove  the  total  coincidence  of  Major  Cart 
Wright's  theory  with  that  which  I  have  stated,  and  I  trust  con 
futed,  in  the  preceding  essay,  it  only  remains  for  me  to  prove, 
that  the  former,  equally  with  the  latter,  confounds  the  sufficiency 
of  the  conscience  to  make  every  person  a  moral  and  amenable 
being,  with  the  sufficiency  of  judgment  and  experience  requisite 
to  the  exercise  of  political  right.  A  single  quotation  will  place 
this  out  of  all  doubt,  which  from  its  length  I  shall  insert  in  a  note.* 

*  '  But  the  equality'  (observe,  that  Major  Cartwright  is  here  speaking 
of  the  natural  right  to  universal  suffrage,  and  consequently  of  the  univer- 


190  THE    FRIEND. 

Great  stress,  indeed,  is  laid  on  the  authority,  of  our  ancient 
\  laws,  both  in  this  and  the  other  works  of  our  patriotic  author  ; 
and  whatever  his  system  may  be,  it  is  impossible  not  to  feel,  that 
the  author  himself  possesses  the  heart  of  a  genuine  Englishman. 
But  still  his  system  can  neither  be  changed  nor  modified  by  these 
appeals  :  for  among  the  primary  maxims,  which  form  the  ground- 
work  of  it,  we  are  informed  not  only  that  law  in  the  abstract  is 
the  perfection  of  reason  ;  but  that  the  law  of  God  and  the  law 
of  the  land  are  all  one  !  What  !  The  statutes  against  witches  ; 
or  those  against  papists,  the  abolition  of  which  gave  rise  to  the 
infamous  riots  in  1780  !  Or,  in  the  author's  own  opinion,  the 
statutes  of  disfranchisemerit  and  for  making  Parliaments  septen- 

sal  right  of  eligibility,  as  well  as  of  election,  independently  of  character  or 
property) — '  the  equality  and  dignity  of  human  nature  in  all  men,  whether 
rich  or  poor,  is  placed  in  the  highest  point  of  view  by  St.  Paul,  when  he 
reprehends  the  Corinthian  believers  for  their  litigations  one  with  another, 
in  the  courts  of  law  where  unbelievers  presided ;  and  as  an  argument  of 
the  competency  of  all  men  to  judge  for  themselves,  he  alludes  to  that  eleva 
tion  in  the  kingdom  of  heaven  which'  is  promised  to  every  man  who  shall 
be  virtuous,  or  in  the  language  of  that  time,  a  saint.     Do  ye  not  know,  says 
he,  that  the  saints  shall  judge  the  world?     And  if  the  world  shall  be  judged 
by  you,  are  ye  unworthy  to  judge  the  smallest  matters?     Know  ye  not  that 
ye  shall  judge  the  angels?     How  much  more  things  that  pertain  to  this  life? 
If  after  such  authorities,  such  manifestations  of  truth  as  these,  any  Chris 
tian  through  those  prejudices,  which  are  the  effects  of  long  habits  of  injus 
tice  and  oppression,  and  teach  us  to  despise  the  poor,  shall  still  think  it 
right  to  exclude  that  part  of  the  commonalty,  consisting  of  tradesmen, 
artificers,  and  laborers,  or  any  of  them  from  voting  in  elections  of  members 
to  serve  in  Parliament,  I  must  sincerely  lament  such  a  persuasion  as  a -mis 
fortune  both  to  himself  and  his  country.    And  if  any  man, — not  having  given 
himself  the  trouble  to  consider  whether  or  not  the  Scripture  be  an  au 
thority,  but  who,  nevertheless,  is  a  friend  to  the  rights  of  mankind — upon 
grounds  of  mere  prudence,  policy,  or  expediency,  shall  think  it  advisable 
to  go  against  the  whole  current  of  our  constitutional  and  law  maxims,  by 
which  it  is  self-evident  that  every  man,  as  being  a  man,  is  created  free, 
born  to  freedom,  and,  without  it,  a  thing,  a  slave,  a  beast ;  and  shall  con 
tend  for  drawing  a  line  of  exclusion  at  freeholders  of  fovty  pounds  a  year, 
or  forty  shillings  a  year,  or  householders,  or  pot-boilers,  so  that  all  who  are 
below  that  line  shall  not  have  a  vote  in  the  election  of  a  legislative  guar 
dian, — which  is  taking  from  a  citizen  the  power  even  of  self-preservation, 
— such  a  man,  I  venture  to  say,  is  bolder  than  he  who  wrestled  with  the 
angel ;  for  he  wrestles  with  God  himself,  who  established  those  principles 
in  the  eternal  laws  of  nature,  never  to  be  violated  by  any  of  his  creatures.' 
Pp.  23,  24. 


ESSAY    V.  191 

nial ! — Nay  !  but  (Principle  28)  an  unjust  law  is  no  law :  and 
(P.  22)  against  the  law  of  reason  neither  prescription,  statute,  nor 
custom,  may  prevail ;  and  if  any  such  be  brought  against  it,  they 
be  not  prescriptions,  statutes,  nor  customs,  but  things  void  :  and 
(P.  29)  what  the  Parliament  doth  shall  be  holdeii  for  naught 
whensoever  it  shall  enact  that  which  is  contrary  to  a  natural 
right !  I  dare  not  suspect  a  grave  writer  of  such  egregious  tri- 
iiing,  as  to  mean  no  more  by  these  assertions,  than  that  what  is 
wrong  is  not  right  ;  and  if  more  than  this  be  meant,  it  must  be 
that  the  subject  is  not  bound  to  obey  any  act  of  Parliament, 
which  according  to  his  conviction  entrenches  on  a  principle  of 
natural  right  ;  which  natural  rights  are,  as  we  have  seen,  not 
confined  to  the  man  in  his  individual  capacity,  but  are  made  to 
confer  universal  legislative  privileges  on  every  subject  of  every 
state,  and  of  the  extent  of  which  every  man  is  competent  to 
judge,  who  is  competent  to  be  the  object  of  law  at  all,  that  is, 
every  man  who  has  not  lost  his  reason. 

In  the  statement  of  his  principles,  therefore,  I  have  not  mis 
represented  Major  Cart wright.  Have  I  then  endeavored  to  con 
nect  public  odium  with  his  name,  by  arraigning  his  motives,  or 
the  tendency  of  his  writings  ?  The  tendency  of  his  writings  in 
my  inmost  conscience  I  believe  to  be  perfectly  harmless,  and  I 
dare  cite  them  in  confirmation  of  the  opinions  which  it  was  the 
object  of  my  introductory  essays  to  establish,  and  as  an  additional 
proof,  that  no  good  man  communicating  what  he  believes  to  be 
the  truth  for  the  sake  of  truth,  and  according  to  the  rules  of  con 
science,  will  be  found  to  have  acted  injuriously  to  the  peace  or  in 
terests  of  society.  The  venerable  state-moralist, — for  this  is  his 
true  character,  and  in  this  title  is  conveyed  the  whole  error  of  his 
system, — is  incapable  of  aiding  his  arguments  by  the  poignant 
condiment  of  personal  slander,  incapable  of  appealing  to  the  envy 
of  the  multitude  by  bitter  declamation  against  the  follies  and  op 
pressions  of  the  higher  classes.  He  would  shrink  with  horror  from 
the  thought  of  adding  a  false  and  unnatural  influence  to  the  cause 
of  truth  and  justice,  by  details  of  present  calamity  or  immediate 
suffering,  fitted  to  excite  the  fury  of  the  multitude,  or  by  promises 
of  turning  the  current  of  the  public  revenue  into  the  channels^  of 

*  I  must  remind  the  reader,  that  this  essay  was  written  in  October,  1809. 
If  Major  Cartwright  has  ever  since  then  acted  in  a  different  spirit,  and 
tampered  personally  with  the  distresses,  and  consequent  irritability  of  the 


192  THE    FRIEND. 

individual  distress  and  poverty,  so  as  to  bribe  the  populace  by  self 
ish  hopes.  It  does  not  belong  to  men  of  his  character  to  delude 
the  uninstructed  into  the  belief  that  their  shortest  way  of  obtain 
ing  the  good  things  of  this  life,  is  to  commence  busy  politicians, 
instead  of  remaining  industrious  laborers.  He  knows,  and  acts 
on  the  knowledge,  that  it  is  the  duty  of  the  enlightened  philan 
thropist  to  plead  for  the  poor  and  ignorant,  not  to  them. 

No. — From  works  written  and  published  under  the  control  of 
austere  principles,  and  at  the  impulse  of  a  lofty  and  generous  en 
thusiasm, — from  works  rendered  attractive  only  by  the  fervor  of 
sincerity,  and  imposing  only  by  the  majesty  of  plain  dealing,  no 
danger  will  be  apprehended  by  a  wise  man,  no  offence  received 
by  a  good  man.  I  could  almost  venture  to  warrant  our  patriot's 
publications  innoxious,  from  the  single  circumstance  of  their 
perfect  freedom  from  personal  themes  in  this  age  of  personality, 
this  age  of  literary  and  political  gossiping,  when  the  meanest 
insects  are  worshiped  with  a  sort  of  Egyptian  superstition,  if 
only  the  brainless  head  be  atoned  for  by  the  sting  of  personal 
malignity  in  the  tail ;  when  the  most  vapid  satires  have  become 
the  objects  of  a  keen  public  interest  purely  from  the  number  of 
contemporary  characters  named  in  the  patch- work  notes, — which 
possess,  however,  the  comparative  merit  of  being  more  poetical 
than  the  text, — and  because,  to  increase  the  stimulus,  the  author 
has  sagaciously  left  his  own  name  for  whispers  and  conjectures  ! 
— In  an  age,  when  even  sermons  are  published  with  a  double 
appendix  stuffed  with  names — in  a  generation  so  transformed 
from  the  characteristic  reserve  of  Britons,  that  from  the  ephem 
eral  sheet  of  a  London  newspaper  to  the  everlasting  Scotch  pro 
fessorial  quarto,  almost  every  publication  exhibits  or  flatters  the 
epidemic  distemper  ;  that  the  very  last  year's  rebuses  in  the 
Lady's  Diary,  are  answered  in  a  serious  elegy  '  On  my  father's 
death,'  with  the  name  and  habitat  of  the  elegiac  QEdipus  sub 
scribed  ; — and  other  ingenious  solutions  are  likewise  given  to  the 
said  rebuses — not,  as  heretofore,  by  Crito,  Philander,  A  B,  X  Y, 
&c.,  but  by  fifty  or  sixty  plain  English  surnames  at  full  length, 
with  their  several  places  of  abode  !  In  an  age,  when  a  bashful 

ignorant,  the  inconsistency  is  his,  not  mine.  If  what  I  then  believed  and 
avowed  should  now  appear  a  severe  satire  in  the  shape  of  a  false  prophecy, 
any  shame  I  might  feel  for  my  lack  of  penetration  would  be  lost  in  the  sin 
cerity  of  my  regret. — 1818. 


ESSAY    V.  193 

Philalethcs  or  Philelcutlicros  is  as  rare  on  the  title-pages  and 
among  the  signatures  of  our  magazines,  as  a  real  name  used  to 
be  in  the  days  of  our  shy  and  notice-shunning  grandfathers  ! 
When — more  exquisite  than  all — I  see  an  epic  poem — spirits  of 
Maro  and  Msnonides,  make  ready  to  welcome  your  new  compeer  ! 
— advertised  with  the  special  recommendation,  that  -the  said 
epic  pocrn  contains  more  than  a  hundred  names  of  living  per 
sons  !  ]NTo — if  works  as  abhorrent,  as  those  of  Major  Cartwright, 
from  all  unworthy  provocatives  to  vanity,  envy,  and  the  selfish 
passions,  could  acquire  a  sufficient  influence  on  the  public  mind 
to  be  mischievous,  the  plans  proposed  in  his  pamphlets  would 
Cease  to  be  altogether  visionary :  though  even  then  they  could  not 
ground  their  claims  to  actual  adoption  on  self-evident  principles 
of  pure  reason,  but  on  the  happy  accident  of  the  virtue  and  good 
sense  of  that  public,  for  whose  suffrages  they  were  presented. 
Indeed  with  Major  Cartwright's  plans  I  have  no  present  con 
cern  ;  but  with  the  principles,  on  which  he  grounds'  the  obliga 
tions  to  adopt  them. 

But  I  must  not  sacrifice  truth  to  my  reverence  for  individual, 
purity  of  intention.  The  tendency  of  one  good  man's  writings  is 
altogether  a  different  thing  from  the  tendency  of  the  system  itself, 
when  seasoned  and  served  up  for  the  unreasoning  multitude,  as 
it  has  been  by  men  whose  names  I  would  not  honor  by  writing 
them  in  the  same  sentence  with  Major  Cartwright's.  For  this 
system  has  two  sides,  and  holds  out  very  different  attractions  to 
its  admirers  who  advance  towards  it  from  different  points  of  the 
compass.  It  possesses  qualities,  that  can  scarcely  fail  of  winning 
over  to  its  banners  a  numerous  host  of  shallow  heads  and  restless 
tempers,  men  who,  without  learning, — or,  as  one  of  my  friends 
has  forcibly  expressed  it,  strong  book-mindedness, — live  as  alms- 
folks  on  the  opinions  of  their  contemporaries,  and  who, — well 
pleased  to  exchange  the  humility  of  regret  for  the  self-complacent 
feelings  of  contempt, — reconcile  themselves  to  the  sans  culotterie 
of  their  ignorance,  by  scoffing  at  the  useless  fox-brush  of  pedan 
try.*  The  attachment  of  this  numerous  class  is  owing  neither  to 

*  He  (Charles  Brandon,  Duke  of  Suffolk)  knowing  that  learning  hath  no 
enemy  but  ignorance,  did  suspect  always  the  want  of  it  in  those  men  who 
derided  the  habit  of  it  in  others :  like  the  fox  in  the  fable,  who,  being  with 
out  a  tail,  would  persuade  others  to  cut  off  theirs  as  a  burthen.  But  he 
liked  well  the  philosopher's  division  of  men  into  three  ranks — some  who 

VOL.  ii.  f 


194  THE    FB1ENJD. 

the  solidity  and  depth  of  foundation  in  this  theory,  nor  to  the 
strict  coherence  of  its  arguments  ;  and  still  less  to  any  genuine 
reverence  for  humanity  in  the  abstract.  The  physiocratic  sys 
tem  promises  to  deduce  all  things,  and  every  thing  relative  to  law 
and  government,  with  mathematical  exactness  and  certainty, 
from  a  few  individual  and  self-evident  principles.  But  who  so 
dull,  as  not  to  be  capable  of  apprehending  a  simple  self-evident 
principle,  and  of  following  a  short  demon s1  ration?  By  this  sys 
tem,  '  the  system'  as  its  admirers  were  wont  to  call  it,  even  as 
they  named  the  writer  who  first  applied  it  in  systematic  detail  to 
the  whole  constitution  and  administration  of  civil  policy, — Du 
Q,uesnoy — le  doctcur,  or  '  the  teacher  ;' — by  this  system  the  ob 
servation  of  times,  places,  relative  bearings,  history,  national  cus 
toms  and  character,  is  rendered  superfluous  ; — all,  in  short, 
which,  according  to  the  common  notion,  makes  the  attainment 
of  legislative  prudence  a  work  of  difficulty  and  long-continued 
effort,  even  for  the  acutest  and  most  comprehensive  minds.  The 
cautious  balancing  of  comparative  advantages,  the  painful  calcu 
lation  of  forces  and  counterforces,  the  preparation  of  circum 
stances,  the  lynx-eyed  watching  for  opportunities,  are  all  super 
seded  ;  and  by  the  magic  oracles  of  certain  axioms  and  definitions 
it  is  revealed  how  the  world  with  all  its  concerns  should  be 
mechanized,  and  then  let  go  on  of  itself.  All  the  positive  insti 
tutions  and  regulations,  which  the  prudence  of  our  ancestors  had 
provided,  are  declared  to  be  erroneous  or  interested  perversions 
of  the  natural  relations  of  man  ;  and  the  whole  is  delivered  over 
to  the  faculty,  which  all  men  possess  equally,  namely,  the  com 
mon  sense  or  universal  reason.  The  science  of  politics,  it  is  said, 
is  but  the  application  of  the  common  sense,  which  every  man 
possesses,  to  a  subject  in  which  every  man  is  concerned.  To  be 
a  musician,  an  orator,  a  painter,  a  poet,  an  architect,  or  even  to 
be  a  good  mechanist,  presupposes  genius  ;  to  be  an  excellent  ar 
tisan  or  mechanic,  requires  more  than  an  average  degree  of 
talent ;  but  to  be  a  legislator  requires  nothing  but  common  sense. 
The  commonest  human  intellect,  therefore,  suffices  for  a  perfect 

knew  good  and  were  willing  to  teach  others  ;  these  he  said  were  like  gods 
among  men — others  who  though  they  knew  not  much,  yet  were  willing  to 
learn ;  these  he  said  were  like  men  among  beasts — and  some  who  knew  not 
good  and  yet  despised  such  as  should  teach  them ;  these  he  esteemed  as 
beasts  among  men. — Lloyd's  State  Worthies,  p.  33. 


ESSAY    V.  195 

insight  into  the  whole  science  of  civil  polity,  and  qualifies  the 
possessor  to  sit  in  judgment  on  the  constitution  and  administra 
tion  of  his  own  country,  and  of  all  other  nations.  This  must 
needs  be  agreeable  tidings  to  the  great  mass  of  mankind.  There 
is  no  subject,  which  men  in  general  like  better  to  harangue  on 
than  politics  ;  none,  the  deciding  on  which  more  flatters  the 
sense  of  self-importance.  For  as  to  what  Johnson  calls  '  plebeian 
envy,'*  I  do  not  believe  that  the  mass  of  men  are  justly  charge 
able  Avith  it  in  their  political  feelings ;  not  only  because  envy  is 
seldom  excited  except  by  definite  and  individual  objects,  but  still 
more  because  it  is  a  painful  passion,  and  not  likely  to  co-exist 
with  the  high  delight  and  self-complacency  with  which  the  ha 
rangues  on  states  and  statesmen,  princes  and  generals,  are  made 
and  listened  to  in  ale-house  circles  or  promiscuous  public  meet 
ings.  .  A  certain  portion  of  this  is  not  merely  desirable,  but  ne 
cessary  in  a  free  country.  Heaven  forbid  that  the  most  ignorant 
of  my  countrymen  should  be  deprived  of  a  subj  ect  so  well  fitted  to 

impart 
An  hour's  importance  to  the  poor  man's  heart  !j- 

But  a  system  which  not  only  flatters  the  pride  and  vanity  of  men, 
but  which  in  so  plausible  and  intelligible  a  manner  persuades 
them,  not  that  this  is  wrong  and  that  ought  to  have  been  man 
aged  otherwise  ;  or  that  Mr.  X.  is  worth  a  hundred  of  Mr.  Y.  as 
a  minister  or  Parliament  man  ;  but  that  all  is  wrong  and  mis 
taken, — nay,  almost  unjust  and  wicked, — and  that  every  man  is 
competent,  and  in  contempt  of  all  rank  and  property,  on  the 
mere  title  of  his  personality,  possesses  the  right,  and  is  under  the 
most  solemn  moral  obligation,  to  give  a  helping  hand  toward 
overthrowing  all ; — this  confusion  of  political  with  religious 
claims,  this  transfer  of  the  rights  of  religion  disjoined  from  the 
austere  duties  of  self-denial,  with  which  religious  rights  exercised 
in  their  proper  sphere  can  not  fail  to  be  accompanied  ;  and  not 
only  disjoined  from  self-restraint,  but  United  with  the  indulgence 
of  those  passions, — self-will,  love  of  power, — which  it  is  the  prin 
cipal  aim  and  hardest  task  of  religion  to  correct  and  restrain  ; — 

*  I  now  more  than  fear  that  Dr.  Johnson  was  in  the  right :  and  that  I 
must  recant  my  opinion  with  '  Coleridge !  thy  wish  was  father  to  that 
thought,  not  a  clearer  insight  into  the  nature  of  man,  not  a  wider  expe 
rience  of  men.'— October  20th,  1818. 

f  Deserted  Village. — Ed. 


196  .THE    FKIEND. 

this,  I  say,  is  altogether  different  from  the  village  politics  of  yore, 
and  may  be  pronounced  alarming  and  of  dangerous  tendency  by 
the  boldest  advocates  of  reform  not  less  consistently,  than  by  the 
most  timid  eschewers  of  popular  disturbance. 

Still,  however,  the  system  had  its  golden  side  for  the  noblest 
minds  :  and  I  should  act  the  part  of  a  coward,  if  I  disguised  my 
convictions,  that  the  errors  of  the  aristocratic  party  were  full  as 
gross,  and  far  less  excusable.  Instead  of  contenting  themselves 
•with  opposing  the  real  blessings  of  English  law  to  the  splendid 
promises  of  untried  theory,  too  large  a  part  of  those,  who  called 
themselves  anti-Jacobins,  did  all  in  their  power  to  suspend  those 
blessings  ;  and  thus  furnished  new  arguments  to  the  advocates 
of  innovation,  when  they  should  have  been  answering  the  old 
ones.  The  most  prudent,  as  well  as  the  most  honest,  mode  of 
defending  the  existing  arrangements  would  have  been,  to  have 
candidly  admitted  what  could  not  with  truth  be  denied,  and 
then  to  have  shown  that,  though  the  things  complained  of  were 
evils,  they  were  necessary  evils  ;  or  if  they  were  removable,  yet 
that  the  consequences  of  the  heroic  medicines  recommended  by 
the  revolutionists  would  be  far  more  dreadful  than  the  disease. 
Now  either  the  one  or  the  other  point,  by  the  double  aid  of  his 
tory  and  a  sound  philosophy,  they  might  have  established  with  a 
certainty  little  short  of  demonstration,  and  with  such  colors  and 
illustrations  as  would  have  taken  strong  hold  of  the  very  feelings 
which  had  attached  to  the  democratic  system  all  the  good  and 
valuable  men  of  the  party.  But  instead  of  this  they  precluded 
the  possibility  of  being  listened  to  even  by  the  gentlest  arid  most 
ingenuous  among  the  friends  of  the  French  revolution,  by  deny 
ing  or  attempting  to  palliate  facts,  which  were  equally  notorious 
and  unjustifiable,  and  by  supplying  the  lack  of  brain  by  an  over- 
ilow  of  gall.  While  they  lamented  with  tragic  outcries  the  in 
jured  monarch  and  the  exiled  noble,  they  displayed  the  most  dis 
gusting  insensibility  to  the  privations,  sufferings,  and  manifold 
oppressions  of  the  great  mass  of  the  continental  population,  and 
a  blindness  or  callousness  still  more  offensive  to  the  crimes  and 
unutterable  abominations  of  their  oppressors.*1  Not  only  was  the 

*  I  do  not  mean  the  sovereigns,  but  the  old  nobility  of  both  Germany  and 
France.  The  extravagantly  false  and  nattering  picture,  which  Burke  gave 
of  the  French  nobility  and  hierarchy,  has  always  appeared  to  me  the  great 
est  defect  of  his,  in  so  many  respects,  invaluable  work. 


ESSAY    V.  197 

Bastile  justified,  but  the  Spanish  Inquisition  itself; — and  this  in 
a  pamphlet  passionately  extolled  and  industriously  circulated  by 
the  adherents  of  the  then  ministry.  Thus,  and  by  their  infatu 
ated  panegyrics  on  the  former  state  of  France,  they  played  into 
the  hands  of  their  worst  and  most  dangerous  antagonists.  In 
confounding  the  conditions  of  the  English  and'-the  French  peas 
antry,  and  in  quoting  the  authorities  of  Milton,  Sidney,  and  their 
immortal  compeers,  as  applicable  to  the  present  times  arid  the 
existing  government,  the  demagogues  appeared  to  talk  only  the 
same  language  as  the  anti- Jacobins  themselves  employed.  For 
if  the  vilest  calumnies  of  obsolete  bigots  were  applied  against 
these  great  men  by  the  one  party,  with  equal  plausibility  might 
their  authorities  be  adduced,  and  their  arguments  for  increasing 
the  power  of  the  people  be  re-applied  to  the  existing  government, 
by  the  other.  If  the  most  disgusting  forms  of  despotism  were 
spoken  of  by  the  one  in  the  same  respectful  language  as  the  ex 
ecutive  power  of  our  own  country,  what  wonder  if  the  irritated 
partisans  of  the  other  were  able  to  impose  on  the  populace  the 
converse  of  the  proposition,  and  to  confound  the  executive  branch 
of  the  English  sovereignty  with  the  despotisms  of  less  happy 
lands  ?  The  first  duty  of  a  wise  advocate  is  to  convince  his  op 
ponents,  that  he  understands  their  arguments  and  sympathizes 
with  their  just  feelings.  But  instead  of  this,  these  pretended 
constitutionalists  recurred  to  the  language  of  insult,  and  to  meas 
ures  of  persecution.  In  order  to  oppose  Jacobinism  they  imi 
tated  it  in  its  worst  features  ;  in  personal  slander,  in  illegal  vio 
lence,  and  even  in  the  thirst  for  blood.  They  justified  the  cor 
ruptions  of  the  state  in  the  same  spirit  of  sophistry,  by  the  same 
vague  arguments  of  general  reason,  and  the  same  disregard  of 
ancient  ordinances  and  established  opinions,  with  which  the  state 
itself  had  been  attacked  by  the  Jacobins.  The  wages  of  state 
dependence  were  represented  as  no  less  sacred  than  the  property 
won  by  industry  or  derived  from  a  long  line  of  ancestors. 

It  was,  indeed,  evident  to  thinking  men,  that  both  parties  were 
playing  the  same  game  with  different  counters.  If  the  Jacobins 
ran  wild  with  the  rights  of  man,  and  the  abstract  sovereignty  of 
the  people,  their  antagonists  flew  off  as  extravagantly  from  the 
sober  good  sense  of  our  forefathers,  and  idolized  as  mere  an  ab 
straction  in  the  rights  of  sovereigns.  Nor  was  this  confined  to 
sovereigns.  They  defended  the  exemptions  and  privileges  of  all 


198  THE    FKIEND. 

privileged  orders,  on  the  presumption  of  their  inalienable  right 
to  them,  however  inexpedient  they  might  have  been  found,  as 
universally  and  abstractly  as  if  these  privileges  had  been  decreed 
by  the  Supreme  Wisdom,  instead  of  being  the  offspring  of  chance 
or  violence,  or  the  inventions  of  human  prudence.  Thus,  while 
they  deemed  themselves  defending,  they  were  in  reality  blacken 
ing  and  degrading  the  uninjurious  and  useful  privileges  of  our 
English  nobility,  which  rest  on  nobler  and  securer  grounds.  Thus 
too,  the  necessity  of  compensations  for  dethroned  princes  was  af 
firmed  as  familiarly,  as  if  kingdoms  had  been  private  estates  : 
and  no  more  disapprobation  was  expressed  at  the  transfer  of  five 
or  ten  millions  of  men  from  one  proprietor  to  another,  than  of  as 
many  score  head  of  cattle.  This  most  degrading  and  superannu 
ated  superstition,  or  rather  this  ghost  of  a  defunct  absurdity, 
raised  up  by  the  necromancy  of  a  violent  re-action, — such  as  the 
extreme  of  one  system  is  sure  to  occasion  in  the  adherents  of  its 
opposite, — was  more  than  once  allowed  to  regulate  our  meas 
ures  in  the  conduct  of  a  war,  011  which  the  integrity  of  the  Brit 
ish  empire  and  the  progressive  civilization  of  all  mankind  de 
pended.  I  could  mention  possessions  of  paramount  and  indis 
pensable  importance  to  first-rate  national  interests,  the  nominal 
sovereign  of  which  had  delivered  up  all  his  sea-ports  and  strong 
holds  to  the  French,  and  maintained  a  French  army  in  his  do 
minions,  and  had  therefore,  by  the  law  of  nations,  made  his  ter 
ritories  French  dependencies — which  possessions  were  not  to  be 
touched,  though  the  natural  inhabitants  were  eager  to  place  them 
selves  under  our  permanent  protection — and  why  ? — They  were 
the  property  of  the  king  of  Naples  !  All  the  grandeur  and  maj 
esty  of  the  law  of  nations,  which  taught  our  ancestors  to  distin 
guish  between  a  European  sovereign  and  the  miserable  despots 
of  oriental  barbarism,  and  to  consider  the  former  as  the  represen 
tative  of  the  nation  which  he  governed,  and  as  inextricably  con 
nected  with  its  fortunes  as  sovereign,  were  merged  in  the  basest 
personality.  Instead  of  the  interests  of  mighty  nations,  it  seem 
ed  as  if  a  mere  law-suit  were  carrying  on  between  John  Doe  and 
Richard  Roe  !  The  happiness  of  millions  was  light  in  the  bal 
ance,  weighed  against  a  theatric  compassion  for  one  individual 
and  his  family,  who, — I  speak  from  facts  that  I  myself  know, — 
if  they  feared  the  French  more,  hated  us  worse.  Though  the 
restoration  of  good  sense  commenced  during  the  interval  of  the 


ESSAY    V.  199 

peace  of  Amiens,  yet  it  was  not  till  the  Spanish  insurrection  that 
Englishmen  of  all  parties  recurred,  in  toto,  to  the  old  English 
principles,  and  spoke  of  their  Hampdens,  Sidneys,  and  Miltons 
with  the  old  enthusiasm.  During  the  last  war,  an  acquaintance 
of  mine — least  of  all  rneii  a  political  zealot — had  named  a  vessel 
which  he  had  just  built — The  Liberty  ;  and  was  seriously  admon 
ished  by  his  aristocratic  friends  to  change  it  for  some  other  name. 
What  ?  replied  the  owner  very  innocently — should  I  call  it  The 
Freedom  ?  That  (it  was  replied)  would  be  far  better,  as  people 
might  then  think  only  of  freedom  of  trade  ;  whereas  Liberty  had 
a  Jacobinical  sound  with  it  !  Alas  !  (and  this  is  an  observation 
of  Denham  and  of  Burke)  is  there  then  np  medium  between  an 
ague-fit  and  a  frenzy-fever  ? 

I  have  said  that  to  withstand  the  arguments  of  the  lawless, 
the  anti- Jacobins  proposed  to  suspend  the  law,  and  by  the  inter 
position  of  a  particular  statute  to  eclipse  the  blessed  light  of  the 
universal  sun,  that  spies  and  informers  might  tyrannize  and  es 
cape  in  the  ominous  darkness.  Oh  !  if  these  mistaken  men,  in 
toxicated  with  alarm  and  bewildered  by  that  panic  of  property, 
which  they  themselves  were  the  chief  agents  in  exciting,  had  ever 
lived  iii  a  country  where  there  was  indeed  a  general  disposition  to 
change  arid  rebellion  !  Had  they  ever  travelled  through  Sicily, 
or  through  France  at  the  first  coming  on  of  the  revolution,  or 
even,  alas  !  through  too  many  of  the  provinces  of  a  sister-land, 
they  could  not  but  have  shrunk  from  their  own  declarations  con 
cerning  the  state  of  feeling  and  opinion  at  that  time  predominant 
throughout  Great  Britain.  There  was  a  time — Heaven  grant 
that  that  time  may  have  passed  by  ! — when  by  crossing  a  nar 
row  strait  they  might  have  learned  the  true  symptoms  of  approach 
ing  danger,  and  have  secured  themselves  from  mistaking  the 
meetings  and  idle  rant  of  such  sedition  as  shrank  appalled  from  the 
sight  of  a  constable,  for  the  dire  murmuring  and  strange  conster 
nation  which  precedes  the  storm  or  earthquake  of  national  dis 
cord.  Not  only  in  coffee-houses  and  public  theatres,  but  even  at 
the  tables  of  the  wealthy,  they  would  have  heard  the  advocates 
of  existing  government  defend  their  cause  in  the  language  and 
with  the  tone  of  men,  who  are  conscious  that  they  are  in  a  mi 
nority.  But  in  England,  when  the  alarm  was  at  the  highest, 
there  was  not  a  city,  no,  not  a  town,  in  which  a  man  suspected 
of  holding  democratic  principles  could  move  abroad  without  re- 


200  THE    FRIEND. 

\   ceiving  some  unpleasant  proof  of  the  hatred  in  which  his  sup- 
I  posed  opinions  were  held  by  the  great  majority  of  the  people  : 
I  and  the  only  instances  of  popular  excess  and  indignation,  were 
I    on  the  side  of  the  government  and  the  established  church.     But 
^""why  need  I  appeal  to  these  invidious  facts  ?     Turn  over  the  pages 
of  history,  and  seek  for  a  single  instance  of  a  revolution  having 
been  effected  without  the  concurrence  of  either  the  nobles,  or  the 
ecclesiastics,  or  the  moneyed  classes,  in  any  country  in  which  the 
influences  of  property  had  ever  been  predominant,  and  where  the 
interests  of  the  proprietors  were  interlinked  !     Examine  the  revo 
lution  of  the  Belgic  provinces  under  Philip  II.  ;  the  civil  wars  of 
France  in  the  preceding  generation,  the  history  of  the  American 
revolution,  or  the  yet  more  recent  events  in  Sweden  and  in  Spain  ; 
and  it  will  be  scarcely  possible  not  to  perceive,  that  in  England, 
from  1791  to  the  peace  of  Amiens,  there  were  neither  tendencies 
to  confederacy  nor  actual  confederacies,  against  which  the  exist 
ing  laws  had  not  provided  both  sufficient  safeguards  and  an  ample 
punishment.     But  alas  !  the  panic  of  property  had  been  struck 
in  the  first  instance  for  party  purposes  ;  and  when  it  became 
general,  its  propagators  caught  it  themselves,  and  ended  in  be 
lieving  their  own  lie  ; — even  as  the  bulls  in  Borodale  are  said 
sometimes  to  run   mad  with  the  echo  of  their  own  bellowing. 
The  consequences  were  most  injurious.      Our  attention  was  con 
centred  on  a  monster  which  could  not  survive  the  convulsions  in 
which  it  had  been  brought  forth, — even  the  enlightened  Burke 
himself  too  often  talking  and  reasoning  as  if  a  perpetual  and  or 
ganized  anarchy  had  been  a  possible  thing  !     Thus  while  we 
were  warring    against    French   doctrines,   we  took    little  heed 
whether  the  means  by  which  we  attempted  to  overthrow  them 
were  not  likely  to  aid  and  augment  the  far  more  formidable  evil 
of  French  ambition.     Like  children,  we  ran  away  from  the  yelp 
ing  of  a  cur,  and  took  shelter  at  the  heels  of  a  vicious  war-horse. 
The  conduct  of  the  aristocratic  party  was  equally  unwise  in 
private  life  and  to  individuals,  especially  to  the  young  and  inex 
perienced,  who  were  surely  to  be  forgiven  for  having  had  theii 
imagination  dazzled,  and  their  enthusiasm  kindled,  by  a  novelty  ' 
so  specious,  that  even  an  old  and  tried  statesman,  Mr.  Fox,  had 
pronounced  it  a  stupendous  monument  of  human  wisdom  and  hu 
man  happiness.     This  was  indeed  a  gross  delusion,  but  assuredly 
for  young  men  at  least,  a  very  venial  one.     To  hope  too  boldly 


ESSAY    V.  201 

of  human  nature  is  a  fault  which  all  good  men  have  an  interest 
in  forgiving1.  Nor  was  it  less  removable  than  venial,  if  the  party 
had  taken  the  only  way  by  which  the  error  could  be,  or  even 
ought  to  have  been  removed.  Having  first  sympathized  with  the 
warm  benevolence  and  the  enthusiasm  for  liberty,  which  had  con 
secrated  it,  they  should  have  then  shown  the  young  enthusiasts 
that  liberty  was  not  the  only  blessing  of  society  ;  that,  though  de 
sirable,  even  for  its  own  sake,  it  yet  derived  its  main  value  as  the 
means  of  calling  forth  and  securing  other  advantages  and  excel 
lences,  the  activities  of  industry,  the  security  of  life  and  property, 
the  peaceful  energies  of  genius  and  manifold  talent,  the  develop 
ment  of  the  moral  virtues,  and  the  independence  and  dignity  of 
the  nation  in  its  relations  to  foreign  powers :  and  that  neither 
these  nor  liberty  itself  could  subsist  in  a  country  so  various  in  its 
soils,  so  long  inhabited,  and  so  fully  peopled  as  Great  Britain, 
without  difference  of  ranks  and  without  laws  which  recognized 
and  protected  the  privileges  of  each.  But  instead  of  thus  win 
ning  them  back  from  the  snare,  they  too  often  drove  them  into  it 
by  angry  contumelies,  which  being  in  contradiction  with  each 
other  could  only  excite  contempt  for  those  that  uttered  them. 
To  prove  the  folly  of  the  opinions,  they  were  represented  as  the 
crude  fancies  of  unfledged  wit  and  school-boy  statesmen  ;  but 
when  abhorrence  was  to  be  expressed,  the  self-same  unfledged 
school-boys  were  invested  with  all  the  "attributes  of  brooding  con 
spiracy  and  hoary-headed  treason.  Nay,  a  sentence  of  absolute 
reprobation  was  passed  on  them ;  and  the  speculative  error  of 
Jacobinism  was  equalized  to  the  mysterious  sin  in  Scripture, 
which  in  some  inexplicable  manner  excludes  not  only  mercy  but 
even  repentance.  It  became  the  watch- word  of  the  party,  once  a 
Jacobin  always  a  Jacobin.  And  wherefore  ?*  I  will  suppose 
this  question  asked  by  an  individual,  who  in  his  youth  or  earliest 
manhood  had  been  enamored  of  a  system,  which  for  him  had 
combined  at  once  the  austere  beauty  of  science  with  all  the  light 
and  colors  of  imagination,  and  with  all  the  warmth  of  wide  re 
ligious  charity,  and  who,  overlooking  its  ideal  essence,  had  dreamed 
of  actually  building  a  government  on  personal  and  natural  rights 

*  The  passage  which  follows  was  first  published  in  the  Morning  Post,  in 
the  year  1800,  and  contained,  if  I  mistake  not,  the  first  philosophical  appro 
priation  of  a  precise  import  to  the  word  Jacobin,  as  distinct  from  republican, 
democrat,  and  demagogue.  [The  article  appeared  Oct.  21,  1802.  S.  C.] 


202  THE    FKIEND. 

alone. — And  wherefore  ?  Is  Jacobinism  an  absurdity,  and  have 
we  no  understanding  by  which  to  detect  it  ?  Is  it  productive  of 
all  misery  and  all  horrors,  and  have  we  no  natural  humanity  to 
make  us  turn  away  with  indignation  and  loathing  from  it  ? 
Uproar  and  confusion,  insecurity  of  person  and  of  property,  the 
tyranny  of  mobs  or  the  domination  of  a  soldiery  ;  private  houses 
changed  to  brothels,  the  ceremony  of  marriage  but  an  initiation 
to  harlotry,  and  marriage  itself  degraded  to  mere  concubinage — 
these,  the  wiser  advocates  of  aristocracy  have  said,  and  truly  said, 
are  the  effects  of  Jacobinism  !  In  private  life,  an  insufferable 
licentiousness,  and  abroad  an  intolerable  despotism.  Once  a 
Jacobin,  always  a  Jacobin — 0  wherefore  ?  Is  it  because  the 
creed  which  we  have  stated  is  dazzling  at  first  sight  to  the  young, 
the  innocent,  the  disinterested,  and  to  those,  who  judging  of  men 
in  general  from  their  own  uncorrupted  hearts,  judge  erroneously, 
and  expect  unwisely  ?  Is  it,  because  it  deceives  the  mind  in  its 
purest  and  most  flexible  period  ?  Is  it,  because  it  is  an  error, 
that  every  day's  experience  aids  to  detect?  An  error  against 
which  all  history  is  full  of  warning  examples  ?  Or  is  it  because 
the  experiment  has  been  tried  before  our  eyes  and  the  error  made 
palpable  ? 

From  what  source  are  we  to  derive  this  strange  phenomenon, 
that  the  young  and  the  enthusiastic,  who,  as  our  daily  experience 
informs  us,  are  deceived  in  their  religious  antipathies,  and  grow 
wiser  ;  in  their  friendships,  and  grow  wiser  ;  in  their  modes  of 
pleasure,  and  grow  wiser  ;  should,  if  once  deceived  in  a  question 
of  abstract  politics,  cling  to  the  error  forever  and  ever?  And 
this  too,  although  in  addition  to  the  natural  growth  of  judgment 
and  information  with  increase  of  years,  they  live  in  the  age  in 
which  the  tenets  have  been  acted  upon  ;  and  though  the  conse 
quences  have  been  such,  that  every  good  man's  heart  sickens, 
and  his  head  turns  giddy  at  the  retrospect. 


ESSAY  VI. 

Truth  I  pursued,  as  fancy  sketched  the  way, 
And  wiser  men  than  I  went  worse  astray. 

| 

I  WAS  never  myself,  at  any  period  of  ray  life,  a  convert  to  the 
Jacobinical  system.*  From  my  earliest  manhood,  it  was  an 
axiom  in  politics  with  me,  that  in  every  country  where  property 
prevailed,  property  must  be  the  grand  basis  of  the  government ; 
and  that  that  government  was  the  best,  in  which  the  power  or 
political  influence  of  the  individual  was  in  proportion  to  his 
property,  provided  that  the  free  circulation  of  property  was  not 
impeded  by  any  positive  laws  or  customs,  nor  the  tendency  of 
wealth  to  accumulate  in  abiding  masses  unduly  encouraged.  I 
perceived,  that  if  the  people  at  large  were  neither  ignorant  nor 
immoral,  there  could  be  no  motive  for  a  sudden  and  violent  change 
of  government  ;  and  if  they  were,  there  could  be  no  hope  but  of 

la  change  for  the  worse.  The  temple  of  despotism,  like  that  of 
the  Mexican  God,  would  be  rebuilt  with  human  skulls,  and  more 
firmly,  though  in  a  different  style  of  architecture.!  Thanks  to 
the  excellent  education  which  I  had  received,  my  reason  was  too 
clear  not  to  draw  this  circle  of  power  round  me,  and  my  spirit  too 

'honest  to  attempt  to  break  through  it.  My  feelings,  however,  and 
imagination  did  not  remain  tmkindled  in  this  general  conflagra 
tion  ;  and  I  confess  I  should  be  more  inclined  to  be  ashamed  than 
£roud  of  myself,  if  they  had.  I  was  a  sharer  in  the  general  vor- 

'•  tex,  though  my  little  world  described  the  path  of  its  revolution  /fli 
an  orbit  of  its  own.  What  I  dared  not  expect  from  constitutions 
of  government  and  whole  nations,  I  hoped  from  religion  and  a 
small  company  of  chosen  individuals.  I  formed  a  plan,  as  harm 
less  as  it  was  extravagant,  of  trying  the  experiment  of  human 

'    *  See  Essay  XVI.  of  this  volume.— Ed. 

\  To  the  best  of  my  recollection,  these  were  Mr.  Southey's  words  in  the 
year  1794. 


204  THE    FKIEND, 

perfectibility  on  the  banks  of  the  Susquehanna  ;  where  our  little 
society,  in  its  second  generation,  was  to  have  combined  the  inno 
cence  of  the  patriarchal  age  with  the  knowledge  and  genuine  re 
finements  of  European  culture  ;  and  where  I  dreamed  that  in  the 
sober  evening  of  my  life,  I  should  behold  the  cottages  of  indepen 
dence  in  the  undivided  dale  of  industry, — 

And  oft,  soothed  sadly  by  some  dirgeful  wind, 
Muse  on  the  sore  ills  I  had  left  behind  ! 

Strange  fancies,  and  as  vain  as  strange  !  yet  to  the  intense  interest 
and  impassioned  zeal,  which  called  forth  and  ^trained  every 
faculty  of  my  intellect  for  thefrorganization  and  defence  of  this 
scheme,  I  owe  much  of  whatever  I  at  present  possess,  my  clearest 
insight  into  the  nature  of  individual  man,  and  my  most  compre 
hensive  views  of  his  social  relations,  of  the  true  uses  of  trade  and 
commerce,  and  how  far  the  wealth  and  relative  power  of  nations 
promote  or  impede  their  welfare  and  inherent  strength.  KOI 
were  they  less  serviceable  in  securing  myself,  and  perhaps  some 
ethers,  from  the  pitfalls  of  sedition  :  and  when  we  at  length 
alighted  on  the  firm  ground  of  common  sense  from  the  gradually 
exhausted  balloon  of  youthful  enthusiasm,  though  the  air-built 
castles,  which  we  had  been  pursuing,  had  vanished  with  all  their 
pageantry  of  shifting  forms,  and  glowing  colors,  we  were  yet  free 
from  the  stains  and  impurities  which  might  have  remained  upon 
us,  had  we  been  travelling  with  the  crowd  of  less  imaginative 
malcontents,  through  the  dark  lanes  and  foul  by-roads  of  ordinary 
fanaticism. 

But  oh  !  there  were  thousands  as  young  and  as  innocent  as 
myself  who,  not  like  me,  sheltered  in  the  tranquil  nook  or  inland 
cove  of  a  particular  fancy,  were  driven  along  with  the  general 
current  !  Many  there  were,  young  men  of  loftiest  minds,  yea,  the 
prime  stuff  out  of  which  manly  wisdom  and  practical  greatness 
are  to  be  formed,  who  had  appropriated  their  hopes  and  the  ardor 
of  their  souls  to  mankind  at  large,  to  the  wide  expanse  of  national 
interests,  which  then  seemed  fermenting  in  the  French  republic 
as  in  the  main  outlet  and  chief  crater  of  the  revolutionary  tor 
rents  ;  and  who  confidently  believed,  that  these  torrents,  like  the 
lavas  of  Vesuvius,  were  to  subside  into  a  soil  of  inexhaustible  fer 
tility  on  the  circumjacent  lands,  the  old  divisions  and  mouldering 
edifices  of  which  they  had  covered  or  swept  away — enthusiasts 


ESSAY    VI.  205 

of  kindliest  temperament,  who  to  use  the  words  of  the  poet,  having 
already  borrowed  the  meaning  and  the  metaphor,  had  approached 

the  shield 

Of  human  nature  from  the  golden  side, 
And  would  have  fought  even  to  the  death  to  attest 
The  quality  of  the  metal  which  they  saw. 

My  honored  friend  Mr.  "Wordsworth  has  permitted  me  to  give  a 
value  and  relief  to  the  present  essay,  by  a  quotation  from  one  of 
his  unpublished  poems,  the  length  of  which  I  regret  only  from  its 
forbidding  me  to  trespass  on.  his  kindness  by  making  it  yet  longer. 
I  trust  there  are  many  of  my  readers  of  the  same  age  with  myself, 
who  will  throw  themselves  back  into  the  state  of  thought  and 
feeling  in  which  they  were  when  France  was  reported  to  have 
solemnized  her  first  sacrifice  of  error  and  prejudice  on  the  blood 
less  altar  of  freedom,  by  an  oath  of  peace  and  good-will  to  all 
mankind. 

Oh  !  pleasant  exercise  of  hope  and  joy  ! 
For  mighty  were  the  auxiliars,  which  then  stood 
Upon  our  side,  we  who  were  strong  in  love. 
Bliss  was  it  in  that  dawn  to  be  ah'  ve, 
But  to  be  young  was  very  heaven  ;  —  Oh  !  times, 
In  which  the  meagre  stale  forbidding  ways 
Of  custom,  law,  and  statute,  took  at  once 
The  attraction  of  a  country  in  romance  ; 
"When  reason  seem'd  the  most  to  assert  her  rights, 
When  most  intent  on  making  of  herself 
A  prime  enchanter  to  assist  the  work, 
Which  then  was  going  forward  in  her  name. 
Not  favor'd  spots  alone,  but  the  whole  earth 
The  beauty  wore  of  promise  —  that  which  sets 
(To  take  an  image  which  was  felt  no  doubt 
Among  the  bowers  of  paradise  itself) 
The  budding  rose  above  the  rose,  full  blown. 
What  temper  at  the  prospect  did  not  wake 
To  happiness  unthought  of?     The  inert 
Were  roused,  and  lively  natures  rapt  away. 
They  who  had  fed  their  childhood  upon  dreams, 
The  play-fellows  of  fancy,  who  had  made 
All  powers  of  swiftness,  subtilty,  and  strength 

^ 


Their  ministers,  used  to  stir  in  lordly 
Among  the  grandest  objects  of  the  sense, 
And  deal  with  whatsoever  they  found  there 
As  if  they  had  within  some  lurking  right 


206  THE    FRIEND. 

To  wield  it ; — they  too,  who  of  gentle  mood 

Had  watch'd  all  gentle  motions,  and  to  these 

Had  fitted  their  own  thoughts,  schemers  more  mild 

And  in  the  region  of  their  peaceful  selves ; 

Now  was  it  that  both  found,  the  meek  and  lofty 
Did  both  find  helpers  to  their  heart's  desire 
And  stuff  at  hand,  plastic  as  they  could  wish — 
Were  call'd  upon  to  exercise  their  skill 
Not  in  Utopia,  subterraneous  fields, 
Or  some  secreted  island,  Heaven  knows  where, 
But  in  the  very  world,  which  is  the  world 
Of  all  of  us,  the  place  where  in  the  end 
We  find  our  happiness,  or  not  at  all. 

The  peace  of  Amiens  deserved  the  name  of  peace,  for  it  gave 
iis  unanimity  at  home,  and  reconciled  Englishmen  with  each 
other.  Yet  it  would  be  as  wild  a  fancy  as  any  of  which  I  have 
treated,  to  expect  that  the  violence  of  party  spirit  is  never  more 
to  return.  Sooner  or  later  the  same  causes,  or  their  equivalents, 
will  call  forth  the  same  opposition  of  opinion,  and  bring  the 
same  passions  into  play.  Ample  would  be  my  recompense, 
could  I  foresee  that  this  present  essay  would  be  the  means  of 
preventing  discord  and  unhappiness  in  a  single  family ;  if  its 
words  of  warning,  aided  by  its  tones  of  sympathy,  should  arm  a 
single  man  of  genius  against  the  fascinations  of  his  own  ideal 
world,  a  single  philanthropist  against  the  enthusiasm  of  his  own 
heart.  Not  less  would  be  my  satisfaction,  dared  I  natter  myself 
that  my  lucubrations  would  not  be  altogether  without  effect  on 
those  who  deem  themselves  men  of  judgment,  faithful  to  the 
light  of  practice,  and  not  to  be  led  astray  by  the  wandering  fires 
of  theory  ; — if  I  should  aid  in  making  these  aware,  that  in  recoil 
ing  with  too  incautious  an  abhorrence  from  the  bugbears  of  in 
novation,  they  may  sink  all  at  once  into  the  slough  of  slavishness 
and  corruption.  Let  such  persons  recollect  that  the  charms  of 
hope  and  novelty  furnish  some  palliation  for  the  idolatry  to  which 
they  seduce  the  mind  ;  but  that  the  apotheosis  of  familiar  abuses 
and  of  the  errors  of  selfishness  is  the  vilest  of  superstitions.  Let 
them  recollect,  too,  that  nothing  can  be  more  incongruous  than  to 
combine  the  pufillanimity,  which  despairs  of  human  improve 
ment,  with  the  arrogance,  supercilious  contempt,  and  boisterous 
anger,  which  have  no  pretensions  to  pardon,  except  as  the  over 
flowing  of  ardent  anticipation  and  enthusiastic  faith.  And  finally, 


ESSAY    VI.  207 

and  above  all,  let  it  be  remembered  by  both  parties,  and  in 
deed  by  controversialists  on  all  subjects,  that  every  speculative 
error  which  boasts  a  multitude  of  advocates,  has  its  golden  as 
well  as  its  dark  side  ;  that  there  is  always  some  truth  connected 
with  it,  the  exclusive  attention  to  which  has  misled  the  under 
standing,  some  moral  beauty  which  has  given  it  charms  for  the 
heart.  Let  it  be  remembered  that  no  assailant  of  an  error  can 
reasonably  hope  to  be  listened  to  by  its  advocates,  who  has  not 
proved  to  them  that  he  has  seen  the  disputed  subject  in  the  same 
point  of  view,  and  is  capable  of  contemplating  it  with  the  same 
feelings  as  themselves  ;  for  why  should  we  abandon  a  cause  at 
the  persuasions  of  one  who  is  ignorant  of  the  reasons  which  have 
attached  us  to  it  ?  Let  it  be  remembered,  that  to  write,  however 
ably,  merely  to  convince  those  who  are  already  convinced,  dis 
plays  but  the  courage  of  a  boaster  ;  and  in  any  subject  to  rail 
against  the  evil  before  we  have  inquired  for  the  good,  and  to  ex 
asperate  the  passions  of  those  who  think  with  us,  by  caricaturing 
the  opinions  and  blackening  the  motives  of  our  antagonists,  is  to 
make  the  understanding  the  pander  of  the  passions  ;  and  even 
though  we  should  have  defended  the  right  cause,  to  gain  for  our 
selves  ultimately  from  the  good  and  wise  no  other  praise  than  the 
supreme  Judge  awarded  to  the  friends  of  Job  lor  their  partial 
and  uncharitable  defence  of  his  justice  :  My  wrath  is  kindled 
against  you,  for  ye  have  not  spoken  of  me  the  thing  that  is 
right.* 

*  Job  xlii.  7.— Ed. 


ESSAY   VII. 


ON  THE   VULG-AK   ERRORS    RESPECTING-  TAXES   AND 
TAXATION. 


"Ovrep  yap  ol  rag  ty^e/le^f  dijptJ/uevoi 

"Orav  IJ.KV  rj  hifMVT]  nara^i],  "kan 

'Edv  6'  uvo)  re  K.CU  HUTU  rbv  j36p(3opov  KVKUGLV, 

Alpovot'  KOL  cv  hafj.j3dvei£,  fjv  TTJV  TTO^LV  Taparrris* 

It  is  with  you  as  with  those  that  are  hunting  for  eels.  "While  the  pond  is 
clear  and  settled,  they  take  nothing  ;  but  if  they  stir  up  the  mud  high  and 
low,  then  they  bring  up  the  fish  :  —  and  you  succeed  only  as  far  as  you  can 
set  the  state  in  tumult  and  confusion. 

IN  a  passage  in  the  last  essay,  I  referred  to  the  second  part  of 
the  "  Rights  of  Man,"  in  which  Paine  assures  his  readers  that 
their  poverty  is  the  consequence  of  taxation  :  that  taxes  are  ren 
dered  necessary  only  by  wars  and  state  corruption  ;  that  war  and 
corruption  are  entirely  owing  to  monarchy  and  aristocracy  ;  that 
"by  a  revolution  and  a  brotherly  alliance  with  the  French  repub 
lic^  our  land  and  sea  forces,  our  revenue  officers,  and  three  fourths 
of  our  pensioners,  placemen,  and  other  functionaries,  would  be 
rendered  superfluous  ;  and  that  a  small  part  of  the  expenses  thus 
saved,  would  suffice  for  the  maintenance  of  the  poor,  the  infirm, 
and  the  aged,  throughout  the  kingdom.  Would  to  God  that  this 
infamous  mode  of  misleading  and  flattering  the  loAver  classes  were 
confined  to  the  writings  of  Thomas  Paine  !  But  how  often  do  we 
hear,  even  from  the  mouths  of  our  parliamentary  advocates  for 
popularity,  the  taxes  stated  as  so  much  money  actually  lost  to  the 
people  ;  and  a  nation  in  debt  represented  as  the  same  both  in 
kind  and  consequences,  as  an  individual  tradesman  on  the  brink 
of  bankruptcy  !  It  is  scarcely  possible,  that  these  men  should  be 
themselves  deceived  ;  that  they  should  be  so  ignorant  of  history 
as  not  to  know  that  the  freest  nations,  being  at  the  same  time 
*  Aristoph.  Equites,  v.  864,  <fec.  —  Ed. 


ESSAY    VII.  209 

commercial,  have  been  at  all  times  the  most  heavily  taxed  :  or 
so  void  of  common  sense  as  not  to  see  that  there  is  no  analogy  in 
the  case  of  a  tradesman  and  his  creditors,  to  a  nation  indebted 
to  itself.  Surely,  a  much  fairer  instance  would  be  that  of  a  hus 
band  and  wife  playing  cards  at  the  same  table  against  each 
other,  where  what  the  one  loses  the  other  gains.  Taxes  may  be 
indeed,  and  often  are,  injurious  to  a  country:'  at  no  time,  how 
ever,  from  their  amount  merely,  but  from  the  time  or  injudicious 
mode  in  which  they  are  raised.  A  great  statesman,  lately  de 
ceased,  in  one  of  his  anti-ministerial  harangues  against  some  pro 
posed  impost,  said, — '  the  nation  has  been  already  bled  in  every 
vein,  and  is  faint  with  loss  of  blood.'  This  blood,  however,  was 
circulating  in  the  mean  time  through  the  whole  body  of  the 
state,  and  what  was  received  into  one  chamber  of  the  heart  was 
instantly  sent  out  again  at  the  other  portal.  Had  he  wanted  a 
metaphor  to  convey  the  possible  injuries  of  taxation,  he  might 
have  found  one  less  opposite  to  the  fact,  in  the  known  disease  of 
aneurism,  or  relaxation  of  the  coats  of  particular  vessels,  by  a  dis 
proportionate  accumulation  of  blood  in  them,  which  sometimes 
occurs  when  the  circulation  has  been  suddenly  and  violently 
changed,  arid  causes  helplessness,  or  even  mortal  stagnation, 
though  the  total  quantity  of  blood  remains  the  same  in  the  sys 
tem  at  large. 

But  a  fuller  and  fairer  symbol  of  taxation,  both  in  its  possible 
good  and  evil  effects,  is  to  be  found  in  the  evaporation  of  waters 
from  the  surface  of  the  planet.  The  sun  may  draw  up  the  mois 
ture  from  the  river,  the  morass,  and  the  ocean,  to  be  given  back 
in  genial  showers  to  the  garden,  the  pasture,  and  the  corn-field  ; 
but  it  may  likewise  force  away  the  moisture  from  the  fields  of 
tillage,  to  drop  it  on  the  stagnant  pool,  the  saturated  swamp,  or 
the  unprofitable  sand- waste.  The  gardens  in  the  south  of  Eu 
rope  supply,  perhaps,  a  not  less  apt  illustration  of  a  system  of 
finance  judiciously  conducted,  where  the  tanks  or  reservoirs 
would  represent  the  capital  of  a  nation,  and  the  hundred  rills 
hourly  varying  their  channels  and  directions  under  the  gardener's 
spade,  give  a  pleasing  image  of  the  dispersion  of  that  capital 
through  the  whole  population,  by  the  joint  effect  of  taxation  and 
trade.  For  taxation  itself  is  a  part  of  commerce,  and  the  gov 
ernment  may  be  fairly  considered  as  a  great  manufacturing  house, 
carrying  on  in- different  places,  by  means  of  its  partners  and  over- 


210  THE    FRIEND. 

seers,  the  trades  of  the  ship-builder,  the  clothier,  the  iron-founder, 
and  the  like. 

There  are  so  many  real  evils,  so  many  just  causes  of  complaint 
in  the  constitution  and  administration  of  governments,  our  own 
not  excepted,  that  it  becomes  the  imperious  duty  of  every  well- 
wisher  of  his  country,  to  prevent,  as  much  as  in  him  lies,  the 
feelings  and  efforts  of  his  compatriots  from  losing  themselves  on 
a  wrong  scent.  Whether  a  system  of  taxation  is  injurious  or 
beneficial  on  the  whole,  is  to  be  known,  not  by  the  amount  of 
the  sum  taken  from  each  individual,  but  by  that  which  remains 
behind.  A  war  will  doubtless  cause  a  stagnation  of  certain 
branches  of  trade,  and  severe  temporary  distress  in  the  places 
where  those  branches  are  carried  on ;  but  are  not  the  same  ef 
fects  produced  in  time  of  peace  by  prohibitory  edicts  and  com 
mercial  regulations  of  foreign  powers,  or  by  new  rivals  with  su 
perior  advantages  in  other  countries,  or  in  different  parts  of  the 
same  ?  Bristol  has,  doubtless,  been  injured  by  the  rapid  pros 
perity  of  Liverpool  and  its  superior  spirit  of  enterprise  ;  and  the 
vast  machines  of  Lancashire  have  overwhelmed  and  rendered 
hopeless  the  domestic  industry  of  females  in  the  cottages  and 
small  farm-houses  of  "Westmoreland  and  Cumberland.  But  if 
peace  has  its  stagnation  as  well  as  war,  does  not  war  create  or 
re-enliven  numerous  branches  of  industry  as  well  as  peace  ?  Is 
it  not  a  fact,  that  not  only  our  own  military  and  naval  forces, 
but  even  a  part  of  those  of  our  enemy  are  armed  and  clothed  by 
British  manufacturers  ?  It  can  not  be  doubted,  that  the  whole 
of  our  immense  military  force  is  better  and  more  expensively 
clothed,  and  both  these  and  our  sailors  better  fed  than  the  same 
persons  would  be  in  their  individual  capacities  :  and  this  forms 
one  of  the  real  expenses  of  war.  Not,  I  say,  that  so  much  more 
money  is  raised,  but  that  so  much  more  of  the  means  of  comfort 
able  existence  are  consumed,  than  would  otherwise  have  been. 
But  does  not  this,  like  all  other  luxury,  act  as  a  stimulus  on  the 
producing  classes,  and  this  in  the  most  useful  manner,  and  on  the 
most  important  branches  of  production,  on  the  tiller,  on  the  gra 
zier,  the  clothier  and  the  maker  of  arms  ?  Had  it  been  other 
wise,  is  it  possible  that  the  receipts  from  the  property  tax  should 
have  increased,  instead  of  decreased,  notwithstanding  all  the  rage 
of  our  enemy  ? 

Surely,  never  from  the  beginning  of  the  world  was  such  a  trib- 


ESSAY    VII.  211 

ute  of  admiration  paid  by  one  power  to  another,  as  Buonaparte 
within  the  last  few  years  has  paid  to  the  British  empire.  With 
all  the  natural  and  artificial  powers  of  almost  the  whole  of  con 
tinental  Europe,  with  all  the  fences  and  obstacles  of  all  public 
and  private  morality  broken  down  before  him,  with  a  mighty 
empire  of  fifty  millions  of  men,  nearly  two  thirds  of  whom  speak 
the  same  language,  and  are  as  it  were  fused  together  by  the  in- 
tensest  nationality ;  with  this  mighty  and  swarming  empire,  or 
ganized  in  all  its  parts  of  war,  and  forming  one  huge  camp,  and 
himself  combining  in  his  own  person  the  two-fold  power  of  mon 
arch  and  commarider-in-chief ; — with  all  these  advantages,  with 
all  these  stupendous  instruments  and  inexhaustible  resources  of 
offence,  this  mighty  being  finds  himself  imprisoned  by  the  enemy 
whom  he  most  hates,  and  would  fain  despise,  insulted  by  every 
wave  that  breaks  upon  his  shores,  and  condemned  to  behold  his 
vast  flotillas  as  worthless  and  idle  as  the  sea-weed  that  rots 
around  their  keels  !  After  years  of  haughty  menace  and  expen 
sive  preparations  for  the  invasion  of  an  island,  the  trees  and  build 
ings  of  which  are  visible  from  the  roofs  of  his  naval  store-houses, 
he  is  at  length  compelled  to  make  open  confession,  t'hat  he  pos 
sesses  one  mean  only  of  ruining  Great  Britain.  And  what  is  it  ? 
The  ruin  of  his  own  enslaved  subjects.  To  undermine  the  re 
sources  of  one  enemy,  he  reduces  the  continent  of  Europe  to  the 
wretched  state  in  which  it  was  before  the  wide  diffusions  of  trade 
and  commerce,  deprives  its  inhabitants  of  comforts  and  advan 
tages  to  which  they  and  their  fathers  had  been  for  more  than  a 
century  habituated,  and  -thus  destroys,  as  far  as  his  power  ex 
tends,  a  principal  source  of  civilization,  the  origin  of  a  middle 
class  throughout  Christendom,  and  with  it  the  true  balance  of 
society,  the  parent  of  international  law,  the  foster-nurse  of  gen 
eral  humanity,  and,  to  sum  up  all  in  one,  the  main  principle  of 
attraction  and  repulsion,  by  which  the  nations  were  rapidly, 
though  insensibly,  drawn  together  into  one  system,  and  by  which 
alone  they  could  combine  the  manifold  blessings  of  distinct  char 
acter  and  national  independence,  with  the  needful  stimulation 
and  general  influences  of  intercommunity,  and  be  virtually  uni 
ted,  without  being  crushed  together  by  conquest,  in  order  to 
waste  away  under  the  tabes  and  slow  putrefaction  of  a  universal 
monarchy.  This  boasted  pacificator  of  the  world,  this  earthly 


212  THE    FRIEND. 

Providence,^  as  his  Roman  Catholic  bishops  blasphemously  call 
him,  professes  to  entertain  no  hope  of  purchasing  the  destruction 
of  Great  Britain  at  a  less  price  than  that  of  the  barbarism  of  all 
Europe.  By  the  ordinary  war  of  government  against  govern 
ment,  fleets  against  fleets,  arid  armies  against  armies,  he  coiild 
effect  nothing.  His  fleets  might  as  well  have  been  built  at  his 
own  expense  in  our  dockyards,  as  tribute  offerings  to  the  masters 
of  the  ocean  :  whilst  his  army  of  England  lay  encamped  on  his 
coasts  like  wolves  baying  the  moon  ! 

Delightful  to  humane  and  contemplative  minds  was  the  idea 
of  countless  individual  efforts  working  together  by  a  common  in 
stinct  and  to  a  common  object,  under  the  protection  of  an  uitwrit- 
ten  code  of  religion,  philosophy,  and  common  interest,  which  made_ 
peace  and  brotherhood  co-exist  with  the  most  active  hostility. 
Not  in  the  untamed  plains  of  Tartary,  but  in  the  very  bosom  of 
civilization,  and  himself  indebted  to  its  fostering  care  for  his  own 
education  and  for  all  the  means  of  his  elevation  and  power,  did 
this  genuine  offspring  of  the  old  serpent  warm  himself  into  the 
fiend-like  resolve  of  waging  war  against  mankind  and  the  quiet 
growth  of- the  world's  improvement — in  an  emphatic  sense  the 
enemy  of  the  human  race.  By  these  means  only  he  deems  Great 
Britain  assailable, — a  strong  presumption,  that  our  prosperity  is 
built  on  the  common  interest  of  mankind  ; — this  he  acknowledges 
to  be  his  only  hope — and  in  this  hope  he  has  been  utterly  baffled. 

To  what  then  do  we  owe  our  strength  and  our  immunity  ?  To 
the  sovereignty  of  law, — the  incorruptiicss  of  its  administration, — 
our  national  church, — our  religious  sects, — the  purity,  or  at  least 
the  decorum,  of  private  morals,  and  the  independence,  activity, 
and  weight,  of  public  opinion  ? — These  and  similar  advantages 
are  doubtless  the  materials  of  the  fortress,  but  what  has  been  the 
cement  ?  What  has  bound  them  together  ?  What  has  rendered 
Great  Britain,  from  the  Orkneys  to  the  rocks  of  Scilly,  indeed 
and  with  more  than  metaphorical  propriety,  a  body  politic, — our 

*  It  has  been  well  remarked,  that  there  is  something  far  more  shocking 
in  Buonaparte's  pretensions  to  the  gracious  attributes  of  the  Supreme  Ru 
ler,  than  in  his  most  remorseless  cruelties.  There  is  a  sort  of  wild  gran 
deur,  not  ungratifying  to  the  imagination,  in  the  answer  of  Timur  Khan  to 
one  who  remonstrated  with  him  on  the  inhumanity  of  his  devastations :  cur 
me  homincm  putas,  et  non  potius  iram  Dei  in  terris  agentem  ob  pcrniciem 
humani  generis?  Why  do  you  deem  me -a  man,  and  not  rather  the  incar 
nate  wrath  of  God  acting  on  the  earth  for  the  ruin  of  mankind  ? 


ESSAY    VII.  213 

roads,  rivers,  and  canals  being  so  truly  the  veins,  arteries,  and 
nerves,  of  the  state,  that  every  pulse  in  the  metropolis  produces 
a  correspondent  pulsation  in  the  remotest  village  on  its  extreme 
shores  ?  \Yhat  made  the  stoppage  of  the  national  bank  the  con 
versation  of  a  day  without  causing  one  irregular  throb,  or  the 
stagnation  of  the  commercial  current,  in  the  minutest  vessel  ?  J» 
answer  without  hesitation,  that  the  cause  and  mother  principle 
of  this  unexampled  confidence,  of  this  system  of  credit,  which  is 
as  much  stronger  than  mere  positive  possessions,  as  the  soul  of 
man  is  than  his  body,  or  as  the  force  of  a  mighty  mass  in  free 
motion,  than  the  pressure  of  its  separate  component  parts  in  a 
state  of  rest — the  main  cause  of  this,  I  say,  has  been  our  national 
debt.  What  its  injurious  effects  on  the  literature,  the  morals, 
andsreligious  principles  of  this  country,  have  been,  I  shall  here 
after  develop  with  the  same  boldness.  But  as  to  our  political 
strength  and  circumstantial  prosperity,  it  is  the  national  debt 
which  has  wedded  in  indissoluble  union  all  the  interests  of  the 
state,  the  landed  with  the  commercial,  and  the  man  of  independ 
ent  fortune  with  the  stirring  tradesman  and  reposing  annuitant. 
It  is  the  national  debt,  which,  by  the  rapid  nominal  rise  in  the 
value  of  things,  has  made  it  impossible  for  any  considerable  num 
ber  of  men  to  retain  their  own  former  comforts  without  joining 
in  the  common  industry,  and  adding  to  the  stock  of  national  pro 
duce  ;  which  thus  first  necessitates  a  general  activity  and*  then 
by  the  immediate  and  ample  credit,  which  is  never  wanting  to 
him,  who  has  any  object  on  which  his  activity  can  employ  itself, 
gives  each  man  the  means  not  only  of  preserving  but  of  increas 
ing  and  multiplying  all  his  former  enjoyments,  and  all  the  sym 
bols  of  the  rank  in  wrhich  he  was  bom.  It  is  this  which  has 
planted  the  naked  hills  and  inclosed  the  bleak  wastes  in  the  low 
lands  of  Scotland  not  less  than  in  the  wealthier  districts  of  South 
Britain  :  it  is  this,  which,  leaving  all  the  other  causes  of  patriot 
ism  and  national  fervor  undiminished  and  uninjured,  has  added 
to  our  public  duties  the  same  feeling  of  necessity,  the  same  sense 
of  immediate  self-interest,  which  in  other  countries  actuates  the 
members  of  a  single  family  in  their  conduct  toward  each  other. 

Somewhat  more  than  a  year  ago,  I  happened  to  be  on  a  visit 
with  a  friend,  in  a  small  market-town*  in  the  south-west  of  Eng 
land,  when  one  of  the  company  turned  the  conversation  to  the 
*  Nether  Stowcy. — Ed. 


214  THE    FRIEND. 

weight  of  taxes  and  the  consequent  hardness  of  the  times.  1 
answered,  that  if  the  taxes  were  a  real  weight,  and  that  in  pro 
portion  to  their  amount,  we  must  have  been  ruined  long  ago  :  for 
Mr.  Hume,  who  had  proceeded,  as  on  a  self-evident  axiom,  on 
the  hypothesis,  that  the  debt  of  a  nation  was  the  same  as  the 
debt  of  an  individual,  had  declared  our  ruin  arithmetically  de 
monstrable,  if  the  national  debt  increased  beyond  a  certain  sum. 
Since  his  time  it  has  more  than  quintupled  that  sum,  and  yet — 
True,  answered  my  friend,  but  the  principle  might  be  right, 
though  he  might  have  been  mistaken  in  the  time.  But  still,  I 
rejoined,  if  the  principle  were  right,  the  nearer  we  carne  to  that 
given  point,  and. the  greater  and  the  more  active  the  pernicious 
cause  became,  the  more  manifest  would  its  effects  be.  We  might 
not  be  absolutely  ruined,  but  our  embarrassments  would  increase 
in  some  proportion  to  their  cause.  Whereas  instead  of  being 
poorer  and  poorer,  we  are  richer  and  richer.  Will  any  man  in 
his  senses  contend,  that  the  actual  labor  and  produce  of  the 
country  has  not  only  been  decupled  within  half  a  century,  but  in 
creased  so  prodigiously  beyond  that  decuple  as  to  make  six  hun 
dred  millions  a  less  weight  to  us  than  fifty  millions  were  in  the 
days  of  our  grandfathers  ?  But  if  it  really  be  so,  to  what  can  we 
attribute  this  stupendous  progression  of  national  improvement, 
but  to  that  system  of  credit  and  paper  currency,  of  which  the  na 
tional*  debt  is  both  the  reservoir  and  the  water- works  ?  A  con 
stant  cause  should  have  constant  effects  ;  but  if  you  deem  that 
this  is  some  anomaly,  some  strange  exception  to  the  general  rule, 
explain  its  mode  of  operation,  make  it  comprehensible,  how  a 
cause  acting  on  a  whole  nation  can  produce  a  regular  and  rapid 
increase  of  prosperity  to  a  certain  point,  and  then  all  at  once  pass 
from  an  angel  of  light  into  a  daemon  of  destruction  !  That  an  in 
dividual  house  may  live  more  and  more  luxuriously  upon  bor 
rowed  funds,  and  that  when  the  suspicions  of  the  creditors  are 
awakened,  and  their  patience  exhausted,  the  luxurious  spend 
thrift  may  all  at  once  exchange  his  palace  for  a  prison — this  I 
can  understand  perfectly :  for  I  understand,  whence  the  luxuries 
could  be  produced  for  the  consumption  of  the  individual  house, 
and  who  the  creditors  might  be,  and  that  it  might  be  both  their 
inclination  and  their  interest  to  demand  the  debt,  and  to  punish 
the  insolvent  debtor.  But  who  are  a  nation's  creditors  ?  The 
answer  is,  every  man  to  every  man.  Whose  possible  interest 


ESSAY    VII.         .  215 

could  it  be  either  to  demand  the  principal,  or  to  refuse  his  share 
toward  the  means  of  paying  the^  interest  ?  Not  the  merchant's  : 
— for  he  would  but  provoke  a  crash  of  bankruptcy,  in  which  his 
own  house  would  as  necessarily  be  included,  as  a  single  card  in 
a  house  of  cards.  Not  the  landholder's  ; — for  in  the  general  de 
struction  of  all  credit,  how  could  he  obtain  payment  for  the  pro 
duce  of  his  estates  ?  Not  to  mention  the  improbability  that  he 
would  remain  the  undisturbed  possessor  in  so  direful  a  concussion 
— not  to  mention  that  on  him  must  fall  the  whole  weight  of  the 
public  necessities — not  to  mention,  that  from  the  merchant's 
credit  depends  the  ever-increasing  value  of  his  land  and  the 
readiest  means  of  improving  it.  Neither  could  it  be  the  laborer's 
interest ; — for  he  must  be  either  thrown  out  of  employ,  and  lie 
like  the  fish  in  the  bed  of  a  river  from  which  the  water  has  been 
diverted,  or  have  the  value  of  his  labor  reduced  to  nothing  by  the 
irruption  of  eager  competitors.  But  least  of  all  could  it  be  the 
wish  of  the  lovers  of  liberty  which  must  needs  perish  or  be  sus 
pended,  either  by  the  horrors  of  anarchy,  or  by  the  absolute 
power,  with  which  the  government  must  be  invested,  in  order  to 
prevent  them.  In  short,  with  the  exception  of  men  desperate 
from  guilt  or  debt,  or  mad  with  the  blackest  ambition,  there  is 
no  class  or  description  of  men  who  can  have  the  least  interest  in 
producing  or  permitting  a  bankruptcy. 

If  then,  neither  experience  has  acquainted  us  with  any  na 
tional  impoverishment  or  embarrassment  from  the  increase  of 
national  debt,  nor  theory  renders  such  efforts  comprehensible ; — 
for  the  predictions  of  Hume  went  on  the  false  assumption,  that  a 
part  only  of  the  nation  was  interested  in  the  preservation  of  the 
public  credit ; — on  what  authority  are  we  to  ground  our  appre 
hensions  ?  Does  history  record  a  single  nation,  in  which  rela 
tively  to  taxation  there  were  no  privileged  or  exempted  classes, 
in  which  there  were  no  compulsory  prices  of  labor,  and  in  which 
the  interests  of  all  the  different  classes  and  all  the  different  dis 
tricts,  were  mutually  dependent  and  vitally  co-organized,  as  in 
Great  Britain, — has  history,  I  say,  recorded  a  single  instance  of 
such  a  nation  being  ruined  or  dissolved  by  the  weight  of  taxa 
tion  ?  In  France  there  was  no  public  credit,  no  communion  of 
interests ;  its  unprincipled  government  and  the  productive  and 
taxable  classes,  were  as  two  individuals  with  separate  interests. 
Its  bankruptcy  and  the  consequences  of  it  are  sufficiently  com- 


210  THE    FRIEND. 

prehensible.  Yet  the  cahicrs,  or  the  instructions  and  complaints 
sent  to  the  National  Assembly,  from  the  towns  and  provinces  of 
France,  an  immeijse  mass  of  documents  indeed,  but  without  ex 
amination  and  patient  perusal  of  which,  no  man  is  entitled  to 
write  a  history  of  the  French  revolution, — these  proved,  beyond 
contradiction,  that  the  amount  of  the  taxes  was  one  only,  and 
that  a  subordinate  cause,  of  the  revolutionary  movement.  In 
deed,  if  the  amount  of  the  taxes  could  be  disjoined  from  the  mode 
of  raising  them;  it  might  be  fairly  denied  to  have  been  a  cause  at 
all.  Holland  was  taxed  as  heavily  and  as  equally  as  ourselves ; 
but  was  it  by  taxation  that  Holland  was  reduced  to  its  present 
miseries  ? 

The  mode  in  which  taxes  are  supposed  to  act  on  the  market- 
ableness  of  our  manufactures  in  foreign  marts,  I  shall  examine 
on  some  future  occasion,  when  I  shall  endeavor  to  explain  in  a 
more  satisfactory  way  than  has  been  hitherto  done,  to  my  appre 
hension  at  least,  the  real  mode  in  which  taxes  act,  and  how  and 
why,  and  to  what  extent,  they  affect  the  wealth,  and  what  is  of 
more  consequence,  the  well-being  of  a  nation.  But  in  the  pres 
ent  exigency,  when  the  safety  of  the  nation  depends,  on  the  one 
hand,  on  the  sense  which  the  people .  at  large  have  of  the  com 
parative  excellences  of  the  laws  and  government,  and  on  the 
firmness  and  wisdom  of  the  legislators  and  enlightened  classes  in 
detecting,  exposing,  and  removing  its  many  particular  abuses 
and  corruptions  on  the  other,  right  views  on  this  subject  of  taxa 
tion  are  of  such  especial  importance ;  and  I  have  besides  in  my 
inmost  nature  such  a  loathing  of  factious  falsehoods  and  mob- 
sycophancy,  that  is,  the  flattering  of  the  multitude  by  informing 
against  their  betters  ; — that  I  can  not  but  revert  to  that  point  of 
the  subject  from  which  1  began,  namely,  that  the  weight  of  taxes 
is  to  be  calculated  not  by  what  is  paid,  but  by  what  is  left. 
What  matters  it  to  a  man,  that  he  pays  six  times  more  taxes 
than  his  father  did,  if,  notwithstanding,  he  with  the  same  por 
tion  of  exertion  enjoys  twice  the  comforts  which  his  father  did? 
Now  this  I  affirm  to  be  the  case  in  general,  throughout  England, 
according  to  all  the  facts  which  I  have  collected  during  an  ex 
amination  of  years,  wherever  I  have  travelled,  and  wherever  I 
have  been  resident.  I  do  not  speak  of  Ireland,  or  the  Lowlands 
of  Scotland  :  and  if  I  may  trust  to  what  I  myself  saw  and  heard 
there,  I  must  even  except  the  Highlands.  In  the  conversation 


ESSAY    VII.  217 

which  I  have  spoken  of  as  taking-  place  in  the  south-west  of 
England,  by  the  assistance  of  one  or  other  of  the  company,  we 
went  through  every  family  in  the  town  and  neighborhood,  and 
my  assertion  was  found  completely  accurate,  though  the  place 
had  no  one  advantage  over  others,  and  many  disadvantages, — 
that  heavy  one  in  particular,  the  non-residence  and  frequent 
change  of  its  rectors, — the  living  being  always  given  to  one  of 
the  canons  of  Windsor,  and  resigned  on  the  acceptance  of  better 
preferment.  It  was  even  asserted,  and  not  only  asserted  but 
proved,  by  my  friend,*  w4io  has  from  his  earliest  youth  devoted 
a  strong  original  understanding,  and  a  heart  warm  and  benevo 
lent  even  to'  enthusiasm,  to  the  service  of  the  poor  ^nd  the  labor 
ing  class,  that  every  sober  laborer,  in  that  part  of*  England?  at 
least,  who  should  not  marry  till  thirty,  might,  without  any  hard 
ship  or  extreme  self-denial,  commence  housekeeping  at  that  age, 
with  from  a  hundred  to  a  hundred  and  twenty  pounds  belonging 
to  him.  I  have  no  doubt,  that  on  seeing  this  essay,  my  friend 
will  communicate  to  me  the  proof  in  detail.  But  the  price  of 
labor  in  the  south-west  of  England  is  full  one  third  less  than  in 
the  greater  number,  if  not  all,  of  the  northern  counties.  What 
then  is  wanting  ?  Not  the  repeal  of  taxes,  but  the  increased  ac 
tivity  both  of  the  gentry  and  clergy  of  the  land,  in  securing  the 
instruction  of  the  lower  classes.  A  system  of  education  is  want 
ing,  such  a  system  as  that  discovered,  and  to  the  blessings  of 
thousands  realized,  by  Dr.  Bell,  which  I  never  am,  or  can  be, 
weary  of  praising,  while  my  heart  retains  any  spark  of  regard 
for  human  nature,  or  of  reverence  for  human  virtue  ; — a  system, 
by  which  in  the  very  act  of  receiving  knowledge,  the  best  vir 
tues  and  most  useful  qualities  of  the  moral  character  are  awa 
kened,  developed,  and  formed  into  habits.  Were  there  a  Bishop 
of  Durham — no  matter  whether  a  temporal  or  a  spiritual  lord — 
in  every  county  or  half-county,  and  a  clergyman  enlightened  with 
the  views,  and  animated  with  the  spirit,  of  Dr.  Bell,  in  every 
parish,  we  might  bid  defiance  to  the  present  weight  of  taxes, 
and  boldly  challenge  the  whole  world  to  show  a  peasantry  as 
well  fed  and  clothed  as  the  English,  or  with  equal  chances  of 
improving  their  situation,  and  of  securing  an  old  age  of  repose 
and  comfort  to  a  life  of  cheerful  industry. 

I  will  add  one  other  anecdote,  as  it  demonstrates  incontrover- 

*  Thomas  Poole.— Ed. 
VOL.  II. 


218  THE    FRIEND. 

tibly  the  error  of  the  vulgar  opinion,  that  taxes  make  things 
really  dear,  taking  in  the  whole  of  a  man's  expenditure.  A  friend 
of  mine,  who  has  passed  some  years  in  America,  was  questioned 
by  an  American  tradesman,  in  one  of  their  cities  of  the  second 
class,  concerning  the  names  and  number  of  our  taxes  and  rates. 
The  answer  seemed  perfectly  to  astound  him  :  and  he  exclaimed, 
"  How  is  it  possible  that  men  can  live  in  such  a  country  ?  In 
this  land  of  liberty  we  never  see  the  face  of  a  tax-gatherer,  nor 
hear  of  a  duty,  except  in  our  sea-ports."  My  friend,  who  was 
perfect  master  of  the  question,  made  semblance  of  turning  oft'  the 
conversation  to  another  subject  :  and  then,  without  any  apparent 
reference  to  the  former  topic,  asked  the  American,  for  what  sum 
he  thought  a  man  could  live  in  such  and  such  a  style,  with  so 
many  servants,  in  a  house  of  such  dimensions  and  such  a  situa 
tion  (still  keeping  in  his  rnind  the  situation  of  a  thriving  and 
respectable  shopkeeper  and  householder  in  different  parts  of  Eng 
land),  first  supposing  him  to  reside  in  Philadelphia  or  New  York, 
and  then  in  some  town  of  secondary  importance.  Having  re 
ceived  a  detailed  answer  to  these  questions,  he  proceeded  to  con 
vince  the  American,  that  notwithstanding  all  our  taxes,  a  man 
might  live  in  the  same  style,  but  with  incomparably  greater 
comforts,  on  the  same  income  in  London  as  in  New  York,  and  on 
a  considerably  less  income  in  Exeter  or  Bristol,  than  in  any 
American  provincial  town  of  the  same  relative  importance.  It 
would  be  insulting  my  readers  to  discuss  on  how  much  less  a 
person  may  vegetate  or  brutalize  in  the  back  settlements  of  the 
republic,  than  he  could  live  as  a  man,  as  a  rational  and  social 
being,  in  an  English  village  ;  and  it  would  be  wasting  time  to 
inform  him,  that  where  men  are  comparatively  few,  and  unoc 
cupied  land  is  in  inexhaustible  abundance,  the  laborer  and  com 
mon  mechanic  must  needs  receive — not  only  nominally,  but  really 
— higher  wages  than  in  a  populous  and  fully  occupied  country. 
But  that  the  American  laborer  is  therefore  happier,  or  even  in 
possession  of  more  comforts  and  conveniences  of  life  than  a  sober 
or  industrious  English  laborer  or  mechanic,  remains  to  be  proved. 
In  conducting  the  comparison,  we  must  not  however  exclude  the 
operation  of  moral  causes,  when  these  causes  are  not  accidental, 
but  arise  out  of  the  nature  of  the  country,  and  the  constitution  of 
the  government  and  society.  This  being  the  case,  take  away 
from  the  American's  wages  all  the  taxes  which  his  insolence, 


ESSAY    VII.  219 

sloth,  and  attachment  to  spirituous  liquors  impose  on  him,  and 
judge  of  the  remainder  by  his  house,  his  household  furniture,  and 
utensils — and  if  I  have  not  been  grievously  deceived  by  those 
whose  veracity  and  good  sense  I  have  found  unquestionable  in  all 
other  respects,  the  cottage  of  an  honest  English  husbandman,  in 
the  service  of  an  enlightened  and  liberal  farmer,  who  is  paid  for 
his  labor  at  the  price  usual  in  Yorkshire  or  Northumberland, 
would  in  the  mind  of  a  man  in  the  same  rank  of  life,  who  had 
seen  a  true  account  of  America,  make  no  impressions  favorable 
to  emigration.  This,  however,  I  confess,  is  a  balance  of  morals 
rather  than  of  circumstances  :  it  proves,  however,  that  where 
foresight  and  good  morals  exist,  the  taxes  do  not  stand  in  the 
way  of  an  industrious  man's  comforts. 

Dr.  Price  almost  succeeded  in  persuading  the  English  nation, 
— for  it  is  a  curious  fact,  that  the  fancy  of  our  calamitous  situa 
tion  is  a  sort  of  necessary  sauce  without  which  our  real  prosper 
ity  would  become  insipid  to  us — Dr.  Price,  I  say,  alarmed  the 
country  with  pretended  proofs  that  the  island  was  in  a  rapid  state 
of  depopulation  ; — that  England  at  the  Revolution  had  been, 
Heaven  knows  how  much  more  populous  ;  and  that  in  Q,ueen 
Elizabeth's  time,  or  about  the  Reformation,  the  number  of  in 
habitants  in  England,  might  have  been  greater  than  even  at 
the  Revolution.  My  old  mathematical  master,  a  man  of  an  un 
commonly  clear  head,  answered  this  blundering  book  of  the 
worthy  doctor's,  and  left  not  a  stone  unturned  of  the  pompous 
cenotaph  in  which  the  effigy  of  the  still  living  and  bustling  Eng 
lish  prosperity  lay  interred.  And  yet  so  much  more  suitable  was 
the  doctor's  book  to  the  purposes  of  faction,  and  to  the  November 
mood  of  what  is  called  the  public,  that  Mr.  Wales's  pamphlet, 
though  a  master-piece  of  perspicacity  as  well  as  perspicuity,  was 
scarcely  heard  of.  This  tendency  to  political  nightmares  in  our 
countrymen,  reminds  me  of  a  superstition,  or  rather  nervous  dis 
ease,  not  uncommon  in  the  Highlands  of  Scotland,  in  which  men, 
though  broad  awake,  imagine  they  see  themselves  lying  dead  at 
a  small  distance  from  them.  The  act  of  Parliament  for  ascer 
taining  the  population  of  the  empire  has  laid  forever  this  uneasy 
ghost  :  and  now,  forsooth,  we  are  on  the  brink  of  ruin  from  the 
excess  of  population,  ani  he  who  would  prevent  the  poor  from 
rotting  away  in  disease,  misery,  and  wickedness,  is  an  enemy  to 
his  country.  A  lately-deceased  miser,  of  immense  wealth,  is  re- 


220  THE    FKIEND. 

ported  to  have  been  so  delighted  with  this  splendid  discovery,  as 
to  have  offered  a  handsome  annuity  to  the  author,  in  part  of  pay 
ment  for  this  new  and  welcome  piece  of  heart-armor.  This,  how 
ever,  we  may  deduce  from  the  fact  of  our  increased  population, 
that  if  clothing  and  food  had  actually  become  dearer  in  propor 
tion  to  the  means  of  procuring  them,  it  would  be  as  absurd  to  as 
cribe  this  effect  to  increased  taxation,  as  to  attribute  the  scanti 
ness  of  fare,  at  a  public  ordinary,  to  the  landlord's  bill,  when 
twice  the  usual  number  of  guests  had  sat  down  to  the  same  num 
ber  of  dishes.  But  the  fact  is  notoriously  otherwise,  and  every 
man  has  the  means  of  discovering  it  in  his  own  house  and  in 
that  of  his  neighbors,  provided  that  he  makes  the  proper  allow 
ances  for  the  disturbing  forces  of  individual  vice  and  imprudence. 
If  this  be  the  case,  I  put  it  to  the  consciences  of  our  literary 
demagogues,  whether  a  lie,  for  the  purposes  of  creating  public 
disunion  and  dejection,  is  not  as  much  a  lie,  as  one  for  the  pur 
pose  of  exciting  discord  among  individuals.  I  entreat  my  readers 
to  recollect,  that  the  present  question  does  not  concern  the  effects 
of  taxation  on  the  public  independence  and  on  the  supposed  bal 
ance  of  the  three  constitutional  powers,  from  which  said  balance, 
as  well  as  from  the  balance  of  trade,  I  own,  1  have  never  been 
able  to  elicit  one  ray  of  common  sense.  That  the  nature  of  our 
constitution  has  been  greatly  modified  by  the  funding  system,  I  do 
not  deny  ; — whether  for  good  or  for  evil,  011  the  whole,  will  form 
part  of  my  essay  on  the  British  constitution  as  it  actually  exists. 

There  are  many  and  great  public  evils,  all  of  which  are  to  be 
lamented,  some  of  which  may,  and  ought  to,  be  removed,  and 
none  of  which  can  consistently  with  wisdom  or  honesty  be  kept 
concealed  from  the  public.  As  far  as  these  originate  in  false 
principles,  or  in  the  contempt  or  neglect  of  right  ones,  and  as  such 
belonging  to  the  plan  of  The  Friend,  I  shall  not  hesitate  to  make 
known  rny  opinions  concerning  them,  with  the  same  fearless  sim 
plicity  with  which  I  have  endeavored  to  expose  the  errors  of  dis 
content  and  the  artifices  of  faction.  But  for  the  very  reason  that 
there  are  great  evils,  the  more  does  it  behoove  us  not  to  open  out 
on  a  false  scent. 

I  will  conclude  this  essay  with  the  examination  of  an  article 
in  a  provincial  paper  of  a  recent  date,  \\jjiich  is  now  lying  before 
ine  ;  the  accidental  perusal  of  which  occasioned  the  whole  of  the 
preceding  remarks.  In  order  to  guard  against  a  possible  mistake, 


ESSAY    VII.  221 

I  must  premise,  that  I  have  not  the  most  distant  intention  of  de 
fending-  the  plan  or  conduct  of  our  late  expeditions,  and  should  be 
grossly  calumniated  if  I  were  represented  as  an  advocate  for 
carelessness  or  prodigality  in  the  management  of  the  public  purse. 
The  public  money  may  or  may  not  have  been  culpably  wasted. 
I  confine  myself  entirely  to  the  general  falsehood  of  the  principle 
in  the  article  here  cited  ;  for  I  am  convinced,  that  any  hopes  of 
reform  originating  in  such  notions,  must  end  in  disappointment 
and  public  mockery. 

"  ONLY  A  FEW  MILLIONS! 

"  "We  have  unfortunately  of  late  been  so  much  accustomed  to  read  of 
millions  being  spent  in  one  expedition,  and  millions  being  spent  in  another, 
that  a  comparative  insignificance  is  attached  to  an  immense  sum  of  money, 
by  calling  it  only  a  few  millions.  Perhaps  some  of  our  readers  may  have 
their  judgment  a  little  improved  by  making  a  few  calculations,  like  those 
below,  on  the  millions  which  it  has  been  estimated  will  be  lostj  to  the  nation 
by  the  late  expedition  to  Holland ;  and  then,  perhaps,  they  will  be  led  to 
reflect  on  the  many  millions  which  are  annually  expended  in  expeditions, 
which  have  almost  invariably  ended  in  absolute  loss. 

"In  the  first  place,  with  less  money  than  it  cost  the  nation  to  take 
"VValchcren,  <fcc.  with  the  view  of  taking  or  destroying  the  French  fleet  at 
Antwerp,  consisting  of  nin^  sail  of  the  line,  we  could  have  completely  built 
and  equipped,  ready  for  sea,  a  fleet  of  upwards  of  one  hundred  sail  of  the  line. 

"  Or,  secondly,  a  new  town  could  be  built  in  every  county  of  England, 
and  each  town  consist  of  upwards  of  1000  substantial  houses  for  a  less  sum. 

"  Or,  thirdly,  it  would  have  been  enough  to  give  100^.  to  2000  poor  fami 
lies  in  every  county  in  England  and  Wales. 

"Or,  fourthly,  it  would  be  more  than  sufficient  to  give  a  handsome 
marriage  portion  to  200,000  young  women,  who  probably,  if  they  had  even 
less  than  50/.  would  not  long  remain  unsolicited  to  enter  the  happy  state. 

"  Or,  fifthly,  a  much  less  sum  would  enable  the  legislature  to  establish  a 
life  boat  in  every  port  in  the  United  Kingdom,  and  provide  for  ten  or 
twelve  men  to  be  kept  in  constant  attendance  on  each ;  and  100,000^.  could' 
be  funded,  the  interest  of  "which  to  be  applied  in  premiums  to  those  who 
should  prove  to.  be  particularly  active  in  saving  lives  from  wrecks,  <fec.  and 
to  provide  for  the  widows  and  children  of  those  men  who  may  accidentally 
lose  their  lives  in  the  cause  of  humanity. 

"This  interesting  appropriation  of  ten  millions  sterling,  may  lead  our 
readers  to  think  of  the  great  good  that  can  be  done  by  only  a  few  millions." 

The  exposure  of  this  calculation  will  require  but  a  few  sen 
tences.  These  ten  millions  were  expended,  I  presume,  in  arms, 
artillery,  ammunition,  clothing,  provision,  and  the  like,  for  about 
one  hundred  and  twenty  thousand  British  subjects  :  and  I  pre- 


222  THE    FRIEND. 

sume  that  all  these  consumables  were  produced  by,  and  pur 
chased  from,  other  British  subjects.  Now  during  the  building  of 
these  new  towns  for  a  thousand  inhabitants  each  in  every  county, 
or  the  distribution  of  the  hundred  pound  bank  notes  to  the  two 
thousand  poor  families,  were  the  industrious  ship-builders,  clothiers, 
charcoal-burners,  gunpowder-makers,  gunsmiths,  cutlers,  cannon- 
founders,  tailors,  and  shoemakers,  to  be  left  unemployed  and  starv 
ing  ; — or  our  brave  soldiers  and  sailors  to  have  remained  without 
food  and  raiment  ?  And  where  is  the  proof,  that  these  ten 
millions,  which,  observe,  all  remain  in  the  kingdom,  do  not  cir 
culate  as  beneficially  in  the  one  way  as  they  would  in  the  other  ? 
Which  is  better  ?  To  give  money  to  the  idle,  houses  to  those 
who  do  not  ask  for  them,  and  towns  to  counties  which  have 
already  perhaps  too  many,  or  to  afford  opportunity  to  the  indus 
trious  to  earn  their  bread,  and  to  the  enterprising  to  better  their 
circumstances,  and  perhaps  to  found  new  families  of  independent 
proprietors  ?  The  only  mode,  not  absolutely  absurd,  of  consider 
ing  the  subject,  would  be,  not  by  the  calculation  of  the  money  ex 
pended,  but  of  the  labor  of  which  the  money  is  a  symbol.  But 
then  the  question  would  be  removed  altogether  from  the  expedi 
tion  :  for  assuredly,  neither  the  armies  were  raised,  nor  the  fleets 
built  or  manned  for  the  sake  of  conquering  the  Isle  of  Walcheren, 
nor  would  a  single  regiment  have  been  disbanded,  nor  a  single 
sloop  paid  off,  though  the  Isle  of  "Walcheren  had  never  existed. 
The  whole  dispute,  therefore,  resolves  itself  into  this  one  ques 
tion  :  whether  our  soldiers  and  sailors  would  not  be  better  em 
ployed  in  making  canals  for  instance,  or  cultivating  waste  lands, 
than  in  fighting  or  learning  to  fight ;  and  the  tradesman,  in 
making  gray  coats  instead  of  red  or  blue — and  ploughshares 
instead  of  arms.  When  I  reflect  on  the  state  of  China  and  the 
moral  character  of  the  Chinese,  I  dare  riot  positively  affirm  that 
it  would  be  better.  When  the  fifteen  millions,  which  form  our 
present  population,  shall  have  attained  to  the  same  general  purity 
of  morals  and  shall  be  capable  of  being  governed  by  the  same 
admirable  discipline,  as  the  society  of  the  Friends,  I  doubt  not 
that  we  should  be  all  Quakers  in  this  as  in  the  other  points  of 
their  moral  doctrine.  But  were  this  transfer  of  employment 
desirable,  is  it  practicable  at  present, — is  it  in  our  power  ?  These 
men  know,  that  it  is  not.  What  then  does  all  their  reasoning 
amount  to  ?  Nonsense. 


ESSAY   VIII. 

I  have  not  intentionally  either  hidden  or  disguised  the  truth,  like  an  ad 
vocate  ashamed  of  his  client,  or  a  bribed  accomptant  who  falsifies  the  quo 
tient  to  make  the  bankrupt's  ledgers  square  with  the  creditor's  inventory. 
My  conscience  forbids  the  use  of  falsehood  and  the  arts  of  concealment : 
and  were  it  otherwise,  yet  I  am  persuaded,  that  a  system  which  has  pro 
duced  and  protected  so  great  prosperity,  can  not  stand  in  need  of  them.  If 
therefore  honesty  and  the  knowledge  of  the  whole  truth  be  the  things  you 
aim  at,  you  will  find  my  principles  suited  to  your  ends :  and  as  I  like  not 
the  democratic  forms,  so  am  I  not  fond  of  any  others  above  the  rest.  That 
a  succession  of  wise  and  godly  men  may  be  secured  to  the  nation  in  the 
highest  power,  is  that  to  which  I  have  directed  your  attention  in  this  essay, 
which  if  you  will  read,  perhaps  you  may  see  the  error  of  those  principles 
which  have  led  you  into  errors  of  practice.  I  wrote  it  purposely  for  the 
use  of  the  multitude  of  well-meaning  people,  that  are  tempted  in  these 
times  to  usurp  authority  and  meddle  with  government  before  they  have 
any  call  from  duty  or  tolerable  understanding  of  its  principles.  I  never 
intended  it  for  learned  men  versed  in  politics ;  but  for  such  as  will  be  prac 
titioners  before  they  have  been  students. 

BAXTER'S  Holy  Commonwealth,  or  Political  Aphorisms. 

THE  metaphysical,  or  as  I  have  proposed  to  call  them,  meta- 
political  reasoning  hitherto  discussed,  belong  to  government  in 
the  abstract.  But  there  is  a  second  class  of  reasoners  who 
argue  for  a  change  in  our  government  from  former  usage,  and 
from  statutes  still  in  force,  or  which  have  heen  repealed, — so 
these  writers  affirm — either  through  a  corrupt  influence,  or  to 
ward  off  temporary  hazard  or  inconvenience.  This  class,  which 
is  rendered  illustrious  by  the  names  of  many  intelligent  and  vir 
tuous  patriots,  are  advocates  for  reform  in  the  literal  sense  of  the 
word.  They  wish  to  bring  back  the  government  of  Great  Brit 
ain  to  a  certain  form,  which  they  affirm  it  to  have  once  pos 
sessed  ;  and  would  melt  the  bullion  anew  in  order  to  recast  it  in 
the  original  mould. 

The  answer  to  all  arguments  of  this  nature  is  obvious,  and  to 
my  understanding  appears  decisive.  These  reformers  assume 


224  THE    FRIEND. 

the  character  of  legislators  or  of  advisers  of  the  legislature,  not 
that  of  law  judges  or  of  appellants  to  courts  of  law.  Sundry 
statutes  concerning  the  rights  of  electors,  we  will  suppose, — still 
exist ;  so  likewise  do  sundry  statutes  on  other  subjects, — on 
witchcraft  for  instance^ — which  change  of  circumstances  have 
rendered  obsolete,  or  increased  information  shown  to  be  absurd. 
It  is  evident,  therefore,  that  the  expediency  of  the  regulations 
'prescribed  by  them,  and  their  suitableness  to  the  existing  cir 
cumstances  of  the  kingdom,  must  first  be  proved ;  and  on  this 
proof  must  be  rested  all  rational  claims  for  the  enforcement  of 
the  statutes  that  have  not,  no  less  than  for  the  re-enacting  of 
those  that  have,  been  repealed.  If  the  authority  of  the  men 
who  first  enacted  the  laws  in  question,  is  to  weigh  with  us,  it 
must  be  on  the  presumption  that  they  were  wise  men.  But  the 
wisdom  of  legislation  consists  in  the  adaptation  of  laws  to  cir 
cumstances.  If  then  it  can  be  proved,  that  the  circumstances, 
under  which  those  laws  were  enacted,  no  longer  exist ;  and  that 
other  circumstances  altogether  different,  and  in  some  instances 
opposite,  have  taken  their  place  ;  we  have  the  best  grounds  for 
supposing,  that  if  the  men  were  now  alive,  they  would  not  pass 
the  same  statutes.  In  other  words,  the  spirit  of  the  statute  in 
terpreted  by  the  intention  of  the  legislator  would  annul  the  letter 
of  it.  It  is  not  indeed  impossible,  that  by  a  rare  felicity  of  ac 
cident  the  same  law  may  apply  to  two  sets  of  circumstances. 
But  surely  the  presumption  is,  that  regulations  well  adapted  for 
the  manners,  the  social  distinctions,  and  the  state  of  property,  of 
opinion,  and  of  external  relations  of  England  in  the  reign  of 
Alfred,  or  even  in  that  of  Edward  I.,  will  not  be  well  suited  to 
Great  Britain  at  the  close  of  the  reign  of  George  III.  For  in 
stance  :  at  the  time  when  the  greater  part  of  the  cottagers  and 
inferior  farmers  were  in  a  state  of  villenage,  when  Sussex  alone 
contained  seven  thousand,  and  the  Isle  of  Wight  twelve  hundred, 
families  of  bondsmen,  it  was  the  law  of  the  land  that  every  free 
man  should  vote  in  the  assembly  of  the  nation  personally  or  by 
his  representative.  An  act  of  Parliament  in  the  year  1660  con 
firmed  what  a  concurrence  of  causes  had  previously  effected  : — 
every  Englishman  is  now  born  free,  the  laws  of  the  land  are  the 
birthright  of  every  native,  and  with  the  exception  of  a  few 

*  Repealed  now ;  but  many  other  equally  obsolete  acts  remaiii  on  the 
etatute  book,  as  illustrations  of  the  principle  in  the  text. — Ed, 


ESSAY    VIII.  225. 

honorary  privileges  all  classes  obey  the  same  laws.*  Now, 
argues  one  pf  our  political  writers,  it  being  made  the  constitution 
of  the  land  by  our  Saxon  ancestors,  that  every  freeman,  should 
have  a  vote,  and  all  Englishmen  being  now  born  free,  therefore, 
by  the  constitution  of  the  land,  every  Englishman  has  now  a 
right  to  a  vote.  How  shall  we  reply  to  this  without  breach  of 
that  respect,  to  which  the  reasoner  at  least,  if  not  the  reasoning, 
is  entitled  ?  If  it  be  the  definition  of  a  pun,  that  it  is  the  con 
fusion  of  two  different  meanings  under  the  same  or  some  similar 
.sound,  \ve  might  almost  characterize  this  argument  as  being 
grounded  on  a  grave  pun.  Our  ancestors  established  the  right  of 
voting  in  a  particular  class  of  men,  forming  at  that  time  the 
middle  rank  of  society,  and  known  to  be  all  of  them,  or  almost 
all,  legal  proprietors — and  these  were  then  called  the  freemen  of 
England  :  therefore  they  established  it  in  the  lowest  classes  of 
society,  in  those  who  possess  no  property,  because  these  two  are 
now  called  by  the  same  name !  Under  a  similar  pretext, 
grounded  on  the  same  precious  logic,  a  Mameluke  Bey  extorted 
a  large  contribution  from  the  Egyptian  Jews  :  "  These  books, 
the  Pentateuch,  are  authentic?"  "Yes!"  "Well,  the  debt 
then  is  acknowledged  < — and  now  the  receipt,  or  the  money,  or 
your  heads  !  The  Jews  borrowed  a  large  treasure  from  the 
Egyptians  ;  but  you  are  the  Jews,  and  on  you,  therefore,  I  call 
for  the  re-payment."  Besides,  if  a  law  is  to  be  interpreted  by  the 
known  intention  of  its  makers,  the  Parliament  in  1660,  which 
declared  all  natives  of  England  freemen,  but  neither  altered  nor 
meant  thereby  to  alter  the  limitations  of  the  right  of  election, 
did  to  all  intents  and  purposes  except  that  right  from  the  com 
mon  privileges  of  Englishmen,  as  Englishmen. 

A  moment's  reflection  may  convince  us,  that  every  single  stat 
ute  is  made  under  the  knowledge  of  all  the  other  laws,  with 
which  it  is  meant  to  co-exist,  and  by  which  its  action  is  to  be 

*  The  reference  is  to  the  abolition  of  the  military  tenures  at  the  Res 
toration.  "  For  at  length  the  military  tenures,  with  all  their  heavy  ap 
pendages  (having  during  the  usurpation  been  discontinued)  were  destroyed 
at  one  blow  by  the  statute  12  Car.  II.  c.  24,  which  enacts  that  *  .*  * 
all  sorts  of  tenures,  held  by  the  king  or  others,  be  turned  into  free  and 
common  socage ;  save  only  tenures  in  frank-almoign,  &c.  A  statute,  which 
was  a  greater  acquisition  to  the  civil  property  of  this  kingdom  than  even 
magna  charta  itself."  Blackst.  Comm.  II.  c.  5. — Ed. 


226  THE    FRIEND. 

modified  and  determined.  In  the  legislative  as  in  the  religious 
code  the  text  must  not  be  taken  without  the  context.  Now,  I 
think,  we  may  safely  leave  it  to  the  reformers  themselves  to  make 
choice  between  the  civil  and  political  privileges  of  Englishmen 
at  present,  considered  as  one  sum  total,  and  those  of  our  ances 
tors  in  any  former  period  of  our  history,  considered  as  another,  on 
the  old  principle,  '  take  one  and  leave  the  other  ;  but  whichever 
you  take,  take  it  all  or  none."  Laws  seldom  become  obsolete  as 
long  as  they  are  both  useful  and  practicable  ;  but  should  there 
be  an  exception  in  any  given  law,  there  is  no  other  way  of  reviv 
ing  its  validity  but  by  convincing  the  existing  legislature  of  its 
undiminished  practicability  and  expedience  ;  which  in  all  essen 
tial  points  is  the  same  as  the  recommending  of  a  new  law.  And 
this  leads  me  to  the  third  class  of  the  advocates  of  reform,  those, 
namely,  who  leaving  ancient  statutes  to  lawyers  and  historians, 
and  universal  principles  with  the  demonstrable  deductions  from 
them  to  the  schools  of  logic,  mathematics,  theology,  and  ethics, 
rest  all  their  measures,  which  they  wish  to  see  adopted,  wholly 
on  their  expediency.  Consequently,  they  must  hold  themselves 
prepared  to  give  such  proof,  as  the  nature  of  comparative  expe 
diency  admits,  and  to  bring  forward  such  evidence,  as  experience 
and  the  logic  of  probability  can  supply,  that  the  plans  which 
they  recommend  for  adoption,  are  ; — first,  practicable  ;  secondly, 
suited  to  the  existing  circumstances  ;  and  lastly,  necessary  .or  at 
least  requisite,  and  such  as  will  enable  the  government  to  accom 
plish  more  perfectly  the  ends  for  which  it  was  instituted.  These 
are  the  three  indispensable  conditions  of  all  prudent  change,  the 
credentials,  with  which  wisdom  never  fails  to  furnish  her  public 
envoys.  Whoever  brings  forward  a  measure  that  combines  this 
threefold  excellence,  whether  in  the  cabinet,  the  senate,  or  by 
means  of  the  press,  merits  emphatically  the  title  of  a  patriotic 
statesman.  Neither  are  they  without  a  fair  claim  to  respectful 
attention  as  state-counsellors,  who  fully  aware  of  these  conditions, 
and  with  a  due  sense  of  the  difficulty  of  fulfilling  them,  employ 
their  time  and  talents  in  making  the  attempt.  An  imperfect 
plan  is  not  necessarily  a  useless  plan  :  and  in  a  complex  enigma 
the  greatest  ingenuity  is  not  always  shown  by  him  who  first  gives 
the  complete  solution.  The  dwarf  sees  farther  than  the  giant, 
when  he  has  the  giant's  shoulders  to  mount  on. 

Thus,  as  perspicuously  as  I  could,  I  have  exposed  the  erro- 


ESSAY    VIII.  227 

neous  principles  of  political  philosophy,  and  pointed  out  the  one 
only  ground  on  which  the  constitution  of  governments  can  be 
either  condemned  or  justified  by  wise  men. 

If  I  interpret  aright  the  signs  of  the  times,  that  branch  of  poli 
tics  which  relates  to  the  necessity  and  practicability  of  infusing 
new  life  into  our  legislature,  as  the  best  means  of  securing  talent 
and  wisdom  in  the  cabinet,  will  shortly  occupy  the  public  atten 
tion  with  a  paramount  interest.  I  would  gladly,  therefore,  sug 
gest  the  proper  state  of  feeling,  and  the  right  preparatory  notions 
with  which  this  disquisition  should  be  entered  upon  :  and  I  do 
not  know  how  I  can  efi'ect  this  more  naturally,  than  by  relating 
the  facts  and  circumstances  which  influenced  my  own  mind.  I 
can  scarcely  be  accused  of  egotism,  as  in  the  communications  and 
conversations  which  I  am  about  to  mention  as  having  occurred  to 
me  during  my  residence  abroad,  I  am  no  otherwise  the  hero  of 
the  tale,  than  as  being  the  passive  receiver  or  auditor. 

To  examine  any  thing  wisely,  two  conditions  are  requisite  *. 
first,  a  distinct  notion  of  the  desirable  ends,  in  the  complete  ac 
complishment  of  which  would  consist  the  perfection  of  such  a 
thing,  or  its  ideal  excellence  ;  and,  secondly,  a  calm  and  kindly 
mode  of  feeling,  without  which  we  shall  hardly  fail  either  to 
overlook,  or  not  to  make  due  allowances  for,  the  circumstances 
which  prevent  these  ends  from  being  all  perfectly  realized  in  the 
particular  thing  which  we  are  to  examine.  For  instance,  we 
must  have  a  general  notion  what  a  man  can  be  and  ought  to  be, 
before  we  can  fitly  proceed  to  determine  on  the  merits  or  demerits 
of  any  one  individual.  For  the  examination  of  our  own  govern 
ment,  I  prepared  my  mind,  therefore,  by  a  short  catechism,  which 
I  shall  communicate  in  the  next  essay,  and  on  which  the  letter 
and  anecdotes  that  follow,  will,  I  flatter  myself,  be  found  an 
amusing,  if  not  an  instructive,  commentary. 


ESSAY   IX. 

Hoc  potissinmm  pactofelicem  ac  magnum  regem  se  fore  judicans  ;  non  si 
quam  plurimis  sed  si  quam  optimis  impcret.  Proinde  par-urn  esse  putat 
justis  prcssidiis  regnum  suum  mitniisse,  nisi  id-cm  viris  eruditions  juxta  ac 
vita;  intcgritate  prcccellentibus  ditet  atque  honcstet.  Nimiruin  intelligit  liccc 
deinum  esse  vera  regni  decora,  has  veras  opes :  hanc  veram  et  nullis  itnqaam 
sccculis  cessuram  gloriam. — Erasmi  Poncherio,  Episc.  Parisien.  Epis-tola. 

Judging  that  he  will  have  employed  the  most  effectual  means  of  being  a 
happy  and  power  f ul  king,  not  by  governing  the  most  numerous  but  the 
most  moral  people.  He  deems  it  of  small  sufficiency  to  have  protected  the 
country  by  fleets  and  garrison,  unless  he  shall  at  the  same  time  enrich  and 
illustrate  it  with  men  of  eminent  learning  and  sanctity.  For  these  verily 
he  conceives  to  be  the  true  ornaments  and  wealth  of  his  kingdom, — these 
its  only  genuine  and  imperishable  glories. 

IN  what  -do  all  states  agree  ?  A  number  of  men — exert — 
powers — in  union.  "Wherein  do  they  differ  ?  First,  in  the  qual 
ity  and  quantity  of  the  powers.  One  state  possesses  chemists, 
mechanists,  mechanics  of  all  kinds,  men  of  science  ;  the  arte  of 
war  and  peace  ;  and  its  citizens  naturally  strong-  and  of  habitual 
courage.  Another  state  may  possess  none  or  a  few  only  of  these, 
or  the  same  more  imperfectly.  Or  of  two  states  possessing  the 
same  in  equal  perfection  the  one  is  more  populous  than  the  otherr 
as  in  the  instance  of  France  and  Switzerland.  Secondly,  in  the 
more  or  less  perfect  union  of  these  powers.  Compare  Mr. 
Leckie's  valuable  and  authentic  documents  respecting  the  state 
of  Sicily  with  the  preceding  essay  on  taxation.  Thirdly,  in  the 
greater  or  less  activity  of  exertion.  Think  of  the  papal  state 
and  its  silent  metropolis,  and  then  of  the  county  of  Lancaster 
and  the  towns  of  Manchester  and  Liverpool.  "What  is  the  con 
dition  indispensable  to  the  exertion  of  powers  in  union  by  a  num 
ber  of  men?  A  government.  What  are  the  ends  of  govern 
ment  ?  They  are  of  two  kinds,  negative  and  positive.  The 
negative  ends  of  government  are  the  protection  of  life,  of  per 
sonal  freedom,  of  property,  of  reputation,  and  of  religion,  from 
foreign  and  from  domestic  attacks.  The  positive  ends  are  ; — » 


ESSAY    IX,  229 

First,  to  make  the* means  of  subsistence  more  easy  to  each  indi 
vidual  : — Secondly,  that  in  addition  to  the  necessaries  of  life  he 
should  derive  from  the  union  and  division  of  labor  a  share  of  the 
comforts  and  conveniences  which  humanize  and  ennoble  his  na 
ture  ;  and  at  the  same  time  the  power  of  perfecting  himself  in 
his  own  branch  of  industry  by  having-  those  things  which  he 
needs  provided  for  him  by  others  among  his  fellow-citizens  ;  the 
tools  and  raw  or  manufactured  materials '  necessary  for  his  own 
employment  being  included.  I  knew  a  profound  mathematician 
in  Sicily,  who  had  devoted  a  full  third  of  his  life  to  the  discovery 
of  the  longitude,  and  who  had  convinced  not  only  himself  but 
the  principal  mathematicians  of  Messina  and  Palermo  that  he 
had  succeeded :  but  neither  throughout  Sicily  nor  Naples  could 
he  find  a  single  artist  capable  of  constructing  the  instrument 
which  he  had  invented  :* — Thirdly,  the  hope  of  bettering  his 
own  condition  and  that  of  his  children.  The  civilized  man  gives 
up  those  stimulants  of  hope  and  fear  which  constitute  the  chief 
charm  of  the  savage  life  :  and  yet  his  Maker  has  distinguished 
him  from  the  brute  that  perishes,  by  making  hope  an  instinct  of 
his  nature,  and  an  indispensable  condition  of  his  moral  and  in 
tellectual  progression.  But  a  natural  instinct  constitutes  a  natu 
ral  right,  as  far  as  its  gratification  is  compatible  with  the  equal 
rights  of  others.  Hence  our  ancestors  classed  those  who  were 
bound  to  the  soil  (adscriptitii  gleb<x)  and  incapable  by  law  of 
altering  their  condition  from  that  of  their  parents,  as  bondsmen 
or  villeins,  however  advantageously  they  might  otherwise  be  sit 
uated.  Reflect  on  the  direful  effects  of  castes  in  Hindostan,  and 
then  transfer  yourself  in  fancy  to  an  English  cottage, — 

*  The  good  old  man,  who  is  poor,  old,  and  blind,  universally  esteemed 
for  the  innocence  and  austerity  of  his  life  not  less  than  for  his  learning,  and 
yet  universally  neglected,  except  by  persons  almost  as  poor  as  himself, 
strongly  reminded  me  of  a  German  epigram  on  Kepler,  •which  may  be  thus 
translated : — 

No  mortal  spirit  yet  had  clomb  so  high 
As  Kepler — yet  his  country  saw  him  die 
For  very  want !   the  minds  alone  he  fed, 
.  And  so  the  bodies  left  him  without  bread. 

The  good  old  man  presented  me  with  the  book  in  which  he  has  described 
and  demonstrated  his  invention  :  and  I  should  with  great  pleasure  transmit 
it  to  any  mathematician  who  would  feel  an  interest  in  examining  it  and 
communicating  his  opinion  on  its  merits. 


230  THE    FRIEND. 

Where  o'er  the  cradled  infant  bending 
Hope  has  lix'd  her  wishful  gaze, — 

and  the  fond  mother  dreams  of  her  child's  future  fortunes. — Who 
knows  but  he  may  come  home  a  rich  merchant,  like  such  a  one, 
or  be  a  bishop  or  a  judge  ?  The  prizes  arc  indeed  few  and  rare, 
but  still  they  are  possible  :  and  the  hope  is  universal,  and  per 
haps  occasions  more  happiness  than  even  its  fulfilment : — Lastly, 
the  development  of  those  faculties  which  are  essential  to  his 
human  nature  by  the  knowledge  of  his  moral  and  religious  du 
ties,  and  the  increase  of  his  intellectual  powers  in  as  great  a  de 
gree  as  is  compatible  with  the  other  ends  of  social  union,  and 
does  not  involve  a  contradiction.  The  poorest  Briton  possesses 
much  and  important  knowledge,  which  he  would  not  have  had, 
if  Luther,  Calvin,  Newton,  and  their  compeers  had  not  existed; 
but  it  is  evident  that  the  means  of  science  and  learning  could 
not  exist,  if  all  men  had  a  right  to  be  made  profound  mathema 
ticians  or  men  of  extensive  erudition.  Still  instruction  is  one  of 
the  ends  of  government ;  for  it  is  that  only  which  makes  the 
abandonment  of  the  savage  state  an  absolute  duty  :  and  that 
constitution  is  the  best,  under  which  the  average  sum  of  useful 
knowledge  is  the  greatest,  and  the  causes  that  awaken  and  en 
courage  talent  and  genius,  the  most  powerful  and  various. 

These  were  rny  preparatory  notions.  The  influences  under 
which  I  proceeded  to  re-examine  our  own  constitution,  were  the 
following,  which  I  give,  not  exactly  as  they  occurred,  but  in  the 
order  in  which  they  will  be  illustrative  of  the  different  articles  of 
the  preceding  paragraph.  That  we  are  better  and  happier  than 
others  is  indeed  no  reason  for  our  not  becoming  still  better ; 
especially  as  with  states,  as  well  as  individuals,  not  to  be  pro 
gressive  is  to  be  retrograde.  Yet  the  comparison  will  usefully 
temper  the  desire  of  improvement  with  love  and  a  sense  of  grati 
tude  for  what  we  already  are. 

I.  A  LETTER  RECEIVED,  AT  MALTA,  FROM  AN  AMERICAN  OFFICER  OF 
HIGH  RANK,^  WHO  HAS  SINCE  RECEIVED  THE  THANKS  AND  REWARDS 
OF  CONGRESS  FOR  HIS  SERVICES  IN  THE  MEDITERRANEAN. 

SIR,  GRAND  CAIRO,  Dec.  13,  1804. 

The  same  reason,  which  induced  me  to  request  letters  of  in 
troduction  to  his  Britannic  Majesty's  agents  here,  suggested  the 
*  Decatur.— ,Etf. 


ESSAY    IX.  231 

propriety  of  showing  an  English  jack  at  the  main  top-gallant 
mast-head,  on  entering  the  port  of  Alexandria  on  the  26th  ult. 

The  signal  was  recognized  ;  and  Mr.  B was  immediately  on 

board. 

We  found  in  port,  a  Turkish  Vice  Admiral,  with  a  ship  of  the 
line,  and  six  frigates  ;  a  part  of  which  squadron  is  stationed  there 
to  preserve  the  tranquillity  of  the  country ;  with  just  as  much  in 
fluence  as  the  same  number  of  pelicans  would  have  on  the  same 
station. 

On  entering  and  passing  the  streets  of  Alexandria,  I  could  not 
but  notice  the  very  marked  satisfaction,  which  every  expression 
and  every  countenance  of  all  denominations  of  people,  Turks  and 
Frenchmen  only  excepted,  manifested  under  an  impression  that 
we  were  the  avant-couriers  of  an  English  army.  They  had  con 
ceived  this  from  observing  the  English  jack  at  our  main,  taking 
our  flag  perhaps  for  that  of  a  feint,  and  because  as  is  common 
enough  everywhere,  they  were  ready  to  believe  what  they  wished. 
It  would  have  been  cruel  to  have  undeceived  them  :  consequently 
without  positively  assuming  it,  we  passed  in  the  character  of 
Englishmen  among  the  middle  and  lower  orders  of  society,  and 
as  their  allies  among  those  of  better  information.  Wherever  we 
entered  or  wherever  halted,  we  were  surrounded  by  the  wretched 
inhabitants  ;  and  stunned  with  their  benedictions  and  prayers  for 
blessings  on  us.  "  Will  the  English  come  ?  Are  they  coming  ? 
God  grant  the  English  may  come  !  we  have  no  commerce — we 
have  no  money — we  have  no  bread  !  When  will  the  English 
arrive  ?"  My  answer  was  uniformly,  Patience  !  The  same  tone 
was  heard  at  Rosetta  as  among  the  Alexandrians,  indicative  of 
the  same  dispositions  ;  only  it  was  not  so  loud,  because  the  in 
habitants  are  less  miserable,  although  without  any  traits  of  hap 
piness.  On  the  fourth,  we  left  that  village  for  Cairo,  and  as  well 
for  our  security  as '  to  facilitate  our  procurement  of  accommoda 
tions  during  our  voyage,  and  our  stay  there,  the  resident  directed 
his  secretary,  Capt.  V ,  to  accompany  us,  and  to  give  us  lodg 
ings  in  his  house.  We  ascended  the  Nile  leisurely,  and  calling  at 
several  villages,  we  plainly  perceived  that  the  national  partiality, 
the  strong  and  open  expression  of  which  proclaimed  so  loudly  the 
feelings  of  the  Egyptians  of  the  sea-coast,  was  general  through 
out  the  country  ;  and  the  prayers  for  ^the  return  of  the  English  as 
earnest  as  universal. 


232  THE    FRIEND. 

On  the  morning  of  the  sixth  we  went  on  shore  at  the  village 
.  of  Sabour.     The  villagers  expressed  an  enthusiastic  gladness  at 
seeing  red  and  blue  uniforms  and  round  hats  ; — (the  French,  I 
believe,  wear  three-cornered  ones.)     Two  days  before,  five  hun 
dred  Albanian  deserters  from  the  Viceroy's  army  had  pillaged  and 
left  this  village  ;  at  which  they  had  lived  at  free  quarters  about 
four  weeks.     The    famishing    inhabitants  were    now  distressed 
with  apprehensions  from  another  quarter.     A  company  of  wild 
Arabs  were  encamped  in  sight.     They  dreaded  their  ravages  and 
apprized  us   of  danger  from  them.     We  'were   eighteen  in  the 
party,  well   armed  ;    and   a  pretty  brisk   fire   which  we  raised 
among  the  numerous  flocks  of  pigeons  and  other  small  fowl  in  the 
environs,  must  have  deterred  them  from  mischief,  if,  as  is  most 
probable,  they  had  meditated  any  against  us.     Scarcely,  how 
ever,  were  we  on  board  and  under  weigh,  when  we  saw  these 
mounted  marauders  of  the  desert  fall  furiously  upon  the  herds  of 
camels,  buffaloes,  and  cattle  of  the  village,  and  drive  many  of 
them  off  wholly  unarinoyed  on  the  part  of  the  unresisting  inhabi 
tants,  unless  their  shrieks  could  be  deemed  an  annoyance.     They 
afterwards  attacked  and  robbed  several  unarmed  boats,  which 
were  a  few  hours  astern  of  us.     The  most  insensible  must  surely 
have  been  moved  by  the  situation  of  the  peasants  of  that  village. 
While  we  were  listening  to   their  complaints,  they  kissed  our 
hands,  and  with  prostrations  to  the  ground,  rendered  more  affect 
ing  by  the  inflamed  state  of  the  eyes  almost  universal  among 
them,  and  which  the  new  traveller  might  venially  imagine  to 
have  been  the  immediate  effect  of  weeping  and  anguish,  they  all 
implored  English  succor.     Their  shrieks   at  the  assault  of  the 
wild  Arabs  seemed  to  implore  the  same  still  more  forcibly,  while 
it  testified  what  multiplied  reasons  they  had  to   implore  it.     I 
confess,  I  felt  an  almost  insurmountable  impulse  to  bring  our  little 
party  to  their  relief,  and  might  perhaps  have  done  a  rash  act, 
had  it  not  been  for  the  calm  and  just  observation  of  Captain 
V ,  that  "  these  were  common  occurrences,  and  that  any  re 
lief  which  we  could  afford,  would  not  merely  be  only  temporary, 
but  would  exasperate  the  plunderers  to  still  more  atrocious  out 
rages  after  our  departure." 

On  the  morning  of  the  seventh  we  landed  near  a  village.  At 
our  approach  the  villagers  fled  :  signals  of  friendship  brought 
some  of  them  to  us.  When  they  were  told  that  we  were  English- 


ESSAY    IX.  233 

men,  they  flocked  around  us  with  demonstrations  of  joy,  offered 
their  services,  and  raised  loud  ejaculations  for  our  establishment 
in  the  country.  Here  we  could  not  procure  a  pint  of  milk  for  our 
cofiee.  The  inhabitants  had  been  plundered  and  chased  from 
their  habitations  by  the  Albanians  and  desert  Arabs,  and  it  was 
but  the  preceding1  day,  they  had  returned  to  their  naked  cottages. 
Grand  Cairo  differs  from  the  places  already  passed,  only  as  the 
presence  of  the  tyrant  stamps  silence  on  the  lips  of  misery  with 
the  seal  of  terror.  Wretchedness  here  assumes  the  form  of  mel 
ancholy  ;  but  the  few  whispers  that  are  hazarded,  convey  the 
same  feelings  and  the  same  wishes.  And  wherein  does  this  mis 
ery  and  consequent  spirit  of  revolution  consist  ?  Not  in  any  form 
of  government  but  in  a  formless  despotism,  an  anarchy  indeed, — 
for  it  amounts  literally  to  an  annihilation  of  every  thing  that  can 
merit  the  name  of  government  or  justify  the  use  of  the  word  even 
in  the  laxest  sense.  Egypt  is  under  the  most  frightful  despotism, 
yet  has  no  master.  The  Turkish  soldiery,  restrained  by  no  dis 
cipline,  seize  every  thing  by  violence,  not  only  all  that  their  ne 
cessities  dictate,  but  whatever  their  caprices  suggest.  The  Mam 
elukes,  who  dispute  with  these  the  right  of  domination,  procure 
ihemsclvcs  subsistence  by  means  as  lawless  though  less  insup- 
portably  oppressive  ;  and  the  wild  Arabs  availing  themselves  of 
•I he  occasion,  plunder  the  defenceless  wherever  they  find  plunder. 
To  finish  the  whole,  the  talons  of  the  Viceroy  fix  on  every  thing 
which  can  be  changed  into  currency,  in  order  to  find  the  means 
of  supporting  an  ungoverned,  disorganized  banditti  of  foreign 
troops,  who  receive  the  harvest  of  his  oppression,  desert  and  be 
tray  him.  Of  all  this  rapine,  robbery,  and  extortion,  the  wretched 
cultivators  of  the  soil  are  the  perpetual  victims.  A  spirit  of  rev 
olution  is  the  natural  consequence. 

The  reason  the  inhabitants  of  this  country  give  for  preferring 
the  English  to  the  French,  whether  true  or  false,  is  as  natural  as 
it  is  simple,  and  as  influential  as  natural.  "  The  English,"  say 
they,  "pay  for  every  thing, — the  French  pay  nothing,  and  take 
every  thing."  They  do  not  like  this  kind  of  deliverers. 

"Well,  thought  I,  after  the  perusal  of  this  letter,  the  slave-trade, 
— which  had  not  then  been  abolished, — is  a  dreadful  crime,  an 
Engiisl1  iniquity,  and  to  sanction  its  continuance  under  full  con 
viction  -anti  ariiawienteTy  confession  of  its  injustice  and  inhu- 


234  THE    FRIEND. 

manity,  is,  if  possible,  still  blacker  guilt.  "Would  that  our  discon 
tents  were  for  a  while  confined  to  our  moral  wants  !  "Whatever 
may  be  the  defects  of  our  constitution,  we  have  at  least  an  effec 
tive  government,  and  that  too  composed  of  men  who  were  born 
with  us  and  are  to  die  among  us.  We  are  at  least  preserved 
from  the  incursions  of  foreign  enemies  :  the  intercommunion  of 
interests  precludes  a  civil  war,  and  the  volunteer  spirit  of  the 
nation  equally  with  its  laws,  gives  to  the  darkest  lanes  of  our 
crowded  metropolis  that  quiet  and  security  which  the  remotest 
villager  at  the  cataracts  of  the  Nile  prays  for  in  vain,  in  his  mud 
hovel ! 

!Nbt  yet  enslaved  nor  wholly  vile, 

0  Albion,  0  my  mother  isle ! 

Thy  valleys  fair,  as  Eden's  bowers, 

Glitter  green  with  sunny  showers ; 

Thy  grassy  uplands'  gentle  swells 

Echo  to  the  bleat  of  flocks ; — 

Those  grassy  hills,  those  giitt'ring  dells 

Proudly  ramparted  with  rocks, — 

And  ocean  'mid  his  uproar  wild 

Speaks  safety  to  his  island-child, 

Hence  for  many  a  fearless  age 

Has  social  quiet  loved  thy  shore ; 

Nor  ever  proud  invader's  rage 
Or  sack'd  thy  toAvers  or  stain'd  thy  fields  with  gore.* 

II.  ANECDOTE  OF  BONAPARTE. 

BONAPARTE,  during  his  short  stay  at  Malta,  called  out  the 
Maltese  regiments  raised  by  the  Knights,  amounting  to  fifteen 
hundred  of  the  stoutest  young  men  of  the  islands.  As  they  were 
drawn  up  on  the  parade,  he  informed  them,  in  a  bombastic  ha 
rangue,  that  he  had  restored  them  to  liberty ;  but  in  proof  that 
his  attachment  to  them  was  not  bounded  by  this  benefaction,  he 
would  now  give  them  an  opportunity  of  adding  glory  to  freedom 
— and  concluded  by  asking  who  of  them  would  march  forward 
to  be  his  fellow-soldiers  on  the  banks  of  the  Nile,  and  contribute 
a  flower  of  Maltese  heroism  to  the  immortal  wreaths  of  fame, 
with  which  he  meant  to  crown  the  pyramids  of  Egypt !  Not  a 
man  stirred  :  all  gave  a  silent  refusal.  They  were  instantly  sur 
rounded  by  a  regiment  of  French  soldiers,  marched  to  the  Marino, 
*  Ode  To  the  Departing  Year.  Poetical  Works,  VII.  p.  103.— Ed. 


ESSAY    IX.  235 

forced  on  board  the  transports,  and  threatened  with  death  if  any 
one  of  them  attempted  his  escape,  or  should  be  discovered  in  any 
part  of  the  islands  of  Malta  or  Goza.  At  Alexandria  they  were 
always  put  in  the  front,  both  to  save  the  French  soldiery,  and  to 
prevent  their  running  away  ;  and  of  the  whole  number,  fifty 
only  survived  to  revisit  their  native  country.  From  one  of  these 
survivors  I  first  learned  this  fact,  which  was  afterwards  confirmed 
to  rne  by  several  of  his  remaining  comrades,  as  well  as  by  the 
most  respectable  inhabitants  of  Valette. 

This  anecdote  recalled  to  my  mind  an  accidental  conversation 
with  an  old  countryman  in  a  central  district  of  Germany.  I 
purposely  omit  names,  because  the  day  of  retribution  has  come 
arid  gone  by.*  I  was  looking  at  a  strong  fortress  in  the  distance, 
which  formed  a  highly  interesting  object  in  a  rich  and  varied 
landscape,  and  asked  the  old  man,  who  had  stopped  to  gaze  at 
me,  its  name,  adding — How  beautiful  it  looks  !  "It  may  be  well 
enough  to  look  at,"  answered  he,  "but  God  keep  all  Christians 
from  being  taken  thither  !"  He  then  proceeded  to  gratify  the 
curiosity  which  he  had  thus  excited,  by  informing  me  that  the 
Baron had  been  taken  out  of  his  bed  at  midnight  and  car 
ried  to  that  fortress — that  he  was  not  heard  of  for  nearly  two 
years,  when  a  soldier  who  had  fled  over  the  boundaries  sent  in 
formation  to  his  family  of  the  place  and  mode  of  his  imprison 
ment.  As  I  have  no  design  to  work  on  the  feelings  of  my 
readers,  I  pass  over  the  shocking  detail :  had  not  the  language 
and  countenance  of.  my  informant  precluded  such  a  suspicion,  I 
might  have  supposed  that  he  had  be<5n  repeating  some  tale  of 
horror  from  a  romance  of  the  dark  ages.  "  What  was  his  crime  ?" 
I  asked. — "  The  report  is,"  said  the  old  man,  "  that  in  his  capa 
city  as  minister  he  had  remonstrated  with  the concerning 

the  extravagance  of  his  mistress,  an  outlandish  countess  ;  and 
that  she  in  revenge  persuaded  the  sovereign,  that  it  was  the 
Baron  who  had  communicated  to  a  professor  at  Gottingen  the 

*  This  anecdote  refers  to  the  transfer  made  by  the  Landgrave  of  Hesse- 
Cassel  of  a  body  of  his  troops  to  the  service  of  Great  Britain  in  the  first 
American  war  : 

and  leagued  with  these 

Each  petty  German  princeling,  nurs'd  in  gore  ; 

Soul-harden'd  barterers  of  human  blood — 

Death's  prime  slave-merchants — scorpion  whips  of  fate  ! 

Poetical  Works,  VII.  p.  76.~^W. 


236  THE    FRIEND. 

particulars  of  the  infamous  sale  of  some  thousands  of  his  subjects 
as  soldiers."  On  the  same  day  I  discovered  in  the  landlord  of  a 
small  public-house  one  of  the  men  who  had  been  thus  sold.  He 
seemed  highly  delighted  in  entertaining  an  English  gentleman, 
and  in  once  more  talking  English  after  a  lapse  of  so  many 
years.  He  was  far  from  regretting  this  incident  in  his  life,  but 
his  account  of  the  manner  in  which  they  were  forced  away  ac 
corded  in  so  many  particulars  with  Schiller's  impassioned  de 
scription  of  the  same  or  a  similar  scene,  in  his  tragedy  of  Cabal 
and  Love,  as  to  leave  a  perfect  conviction  on  my  mind,  that  the 
dramatic  pathos  of  that  description  was  not  greater  than  its  his 
toric  fidelity. 

As  I  was  thus  reflecting,  I  glanced  my  eye  on  the  leading  par 
agraph  of  a  London  newspaper,  containing  much  angry  declama 
tion,  and  some  bitter  truths,  respecting  our  military  arrange 
ments.  It  were  in  vain,  thought  I,  to  deny  that  the  influence  of 
parliamentary  interest,  which  prevents  the  immense  patronage 
of  the  crown  from  becoming  a  despotic  power,  is  not  the  most 
likely  to  secure  the  attest  commanders  or  the  fittest  persons  for 
the  management  of  our  foreign  empire.  However,  thank  God  ! 
if  we  fight,  we  fight  for  our  own  king  and  country  :  and  griev 
ances  which  may  be  publicly  complained  of,  there  is  some  chance 
of  seeing  remedied. 

III.  A  celebrated  professor  in  a  German  university,  showed  me 
a  very  pleasing  print,  entitled,  Toleration. — A  Roman  Catholic 
priest,  a  Lutheran  divine,  a  Calvinist  minister,  a  Quaker,  a  Jew, 
and  a  philosopher,  were  represented  sitting  round  the  same  table, 
over  which  a  winged  figure  hovered  in  the  attitude  of  protection. 
"  For  this  harmless  print,"  said  my  friend,  "the  artist  was  im 
prisoned,  and  having  attempted  to  escape,  was  sentenced  to  draw 
the  boats  on  the  banks  of  the  Danube,  with  robbers  and  murder 
ers  :  and  there  died  in  less  than  two  months,  from  exhaustion 
and  exposure.  In  your  happy  country,  sir,  this  print  would  be 
considered  as  a  pleasing  scene  from  real  life  :  for  in  every  great* 
town  throughout  your  empire  you  may  meet  with  the  original." 
"  Yes,"  I  replied,  "  as  far  as  the  negative  ends  of  government  are 
concerned,  we  have  no  reason  to  complain.  Our  government 
protects  us  from  foreign  enemies,  and  our  laws  secure  our  lives, 
our  personal  freedom,  our  property,  reputation,  and  religious 
rights,  from  domestic  attacks.  Our  taxes,  indeed,  are  enormous" 


ESSAY    IX.  237 

— "  Oh  !  talk  not  of  taxes,"  said  my  friend,  "  till  you  have  re 
sided  in  a  country  where  the  boor  disposes  of  his  produce  to 
strangers  lor  a  Ibreign  mart,  not  to  bring  back  to  his  family  the 
comforts  and  conveniences  of  foreign  manufactures,  but  to  pro 
cure  that  coin  which  his  lord  is  to  squander  away  in  a  distant 
land.  Neither  can  I  with  patience  hear  it  said,  that  your  laws 
act  only  to  the  negative  ends  of  government.  They  have  a  man 
ifold  positive  influence,  and  their  incorrupt  administration  gives  a 
color  to  all  your  modes  of  thinking,  and  is  one  of  the  chief 
causes  of  your  superior  morality  in  private  as  well  as  public 
life."* 

My  limits  compel  me  to  strike  out  the  different  incidents  which 
I  had  written  as  a  commentary  on  the  former  three  of  the  posi 
tive  ends  of  government.  To  the  moral  feelings  of  my  reader* 
they  might  have  been  serviceable ;  but  lor  their  understandings 
they  are  superfluous.  It  is  surely  impossible  to  peruse  those 
ends,  and  not  admit  that  all  three  are  realized  under  our  govern 
ment  to  a  degree  unexampled  in  any  other  old  and  long  peopled 
country.  The  defects  of  our  constitution,  in  which  word  I  in 
clude  the  laws  and  customs  of  the  land  as  well  as  its  scheme  of 
legislative  and  executive  power,  must  exist,  therefore,  in  the 
fourth,  namely,  the  production  of  the  highest  average  of  general 
information,  of  general  moral  and  religious  principles,  and  the 
excitements  and  opportunities  which  it  affords  to  paramount  ge 
nius  and  heroic  power  in  a  sufficient  number  of  its  citizens. 
These  are  points  in  which  it  would  be  immorality  to  rest  content 
with  the  presumption,  however  well  founded,  that  we  are  better 

*  "The  administration  of  justice  throughout  the  continent  is  partial,  ve 
nal,  and  infamous.  I  have,  in  conversation  with  many  sensible  men,  met 
with  something  of  content  with  their  governments  in  all  other  respects 
than  this ;  but  upon  the  question  of  expecting  justice  to  be  really  and  fairly 
administered,  every  one  confessed  there  was  no  such  thing  to  be  looked  for. 
The  conduct  of  the  judges  is  profligate  and  atrocious.  Upon  almost  every 
cause  that  comes  before  them  interest  is  openly  made  with  the  judges;  and 
woe  betide  the  man,  who,  with  a  cause  to  support  has  no  means  of  conciliat 
ing  favor,  either  by  the  beauty  of  a  handsome  wife,  or  by  other  methods." — 
This  quotation  is  confined  in  the  original  to  France  under  the  monarchy ;  I 
have  extended  the  application,  and  adopted  the  words  as  comprising  the 
result  of  my  own  experience :  and  I  take  this  opportunity  of  declaring,  that 
the  most  important  part  of  Mr.  Leckie's  statement  concerning  Sicily,  I  my 
self  know  to  be  accurate,  and  am  authorized  by  wThat  I  myself  saw  there,  to 
rely  on  the  whole  as  a  fair  and  unexaggerated  representation. 


288  THE    FRIEND. 

than  others,  if  we  are  not  what  we  ought  to  be  ourselves,  and  are 
not  using  the  means  of  improvement.  The  first  question  then 
is,  What  is  the  fact  ?  The  second  upon  the  supposition  of  a  de 
fect  or  deficiency  in  one  or  all  of  these  points,  and  that  to  a  de 
gree  which  may  affect  our  power  and  prosperity,  if  not  our  abso 
lute  safety, — are  the  plans  of  legislative  reform  that  have  hither 
to  been  proposed  fit  or  likely  to  remove  such  defect,  and  supply 
such  deficiency  ?  The  third  and  last  question  is, — Should  there 
appear  reason  to  deny  or  doubt  this,  are  there  any  other  means, 
and  what  are  they  ?  Of  these  points  in  the  concluding  essay  of 
this  section. 

A  French  gentleman  in  the  reign  of  Louis  XIV.  was  comparing 
the  French  and  English  writers  with  all  the  boastfulness  of  na 
tional  prepossession.  "Sir  !"  replied  an  Englishman,  better 
versed  in  the  principles  of  freedom  than  the  canons  of  criticism, 
"  there  are  but  two  subjects  worthy  the  human  intellect,  politics 
and  religion,  our  state  here  and  our  state  hereafter ;  and  on 
neither  of  these  dare  you  write."  Long  may  the  envied  privilege 
be  preserved  to  my  countrymen  of  writing  and  talking  concern 
ing  both  !  Nevertheless,  it  behooves  us  all  to  consider,  that  to 
write  or  talk  concerning  any  subject,  without  having  previously 
taken  the  pains  to  understand  it,  is  a  breach  of  duty  which  we 
owe  to  ourselves,  though  it  may  be  no  offence  against  the  laws  of 
the  land.  The  privilege  of  talking  and  even  publishing  nonsense, 
is  necessary  in  a  free  state  ;  but  the  more  sparingly  we  make 
use  of  it  the  better. 


ESSAY    X. 

Tli en  we  may  thank  ourselves, 
Who  spell-bound  by  the  magic  name  of  peace 
Dream  golden  dreams.     Go,  warlike  Briton,  go, 
For  the  gray  olive-branch  change  thy  green  laurels : 
Hang  up  thy  rusty  helmet,  that  the  bee 
May  have  a  hive,  or  spider  find  a  loom  ! 
Instead  of  doubling  drum  and  thrilling  fife, 
Be  lull'd  in  lady's  lap  -with  amorous  flutes. 
But  for  Napoleon,  know,  he'll  scorn  this  calm  : 
The  ruddy  planet  at  his  birth  bore  sway  ; 
Sanguine,  adust,  his  humor,  and  wild  fire 
His  ruling  element.     Rage,  revenge,  and  cunning 
Make  up  the  temper  of  this  captain's  valor. 

LITTLE  prospective  wisdom  can  that  man  obtain,  who  hurrying 
onward  with  the  current,  or  rather  torrent,  'of  events,  feels  no  in 
terest  in  their  importance,  except  as  far  as  his  curiosity  is  excited 
by  their  novelty  ;  and  to  whom  all  reflection  and  retrospect  are 
wearisome.  If  ever  there  were  a  time  when  the  formation  of 
just  public  principles  becomes  a  duty  of  private  morality  ;  when 
the  principles  of  morality  in  general  ought  to  be  made  to  bear  on 
our  public  suffrages,  and  to  affect  every  great  national  determi 
nation  ;  when,  in  short,  his  country  should  have  a  place  by  every 
Englishman's  fireside  ;  and  when  the  feelings  and  truths  which 
give  dignity  to  the  fireside  and  tranquillity  to  the  death-bed, 
ought  to  be  present  and  influential  in  the  cabinet  and  in  the  sen 
ate — that  time  is  now  with  us.  As  an  introduction  to,  and  at 
the  same  time  as  a  commentary  on,  the  subject  of  international 
law,  I  have  taken  a  review  of  the  circumstances  that  led  to  the 
treaty  of  Amiens,  and  the  recommencement  of  the  war,  more  es 
pecially  with  regard  to  the  occupation  of  Malta. 

In  a  rich  commercial  state,  a  war  seldom  fails  to  become  un 
popular  by  length  of  continuance.  The  first,  or  revolution  war, 
which  towards  its  close,  had  become  just  and  necessary,  perhaps 


240  THE    FRIEND. 

beyond  any  former  example,  had  yet  causes  of  unpopularity  pecu 
liar  to  itself.  Exhaustion  is  the  natural  consequence  of  excessive 
stimulation,  in  the  feelings  of  nations  equaUy  as  in  those  of  in 
dividuals.  Wearied  out  by  overwhelming  novelties  ;  stunned,  as 
it  were,  by  a  series  of  strange  explosions  ;  sick  too  of  hope  long 
delayed  ;  and  uncertain  as  to  the  real  object  and  motive  of  the 
war,  from  the  rapid  change  and  general  failure  of  its  ostensible 
objects  and  motives  :  the  public  mind  for  many  months  preceding 
the  signing  of  the  preliminaries  had  lost  all  its  tone  and  elasticity. 
The  consciousness  of  mutual  errors  and  mutual  disappointments 
disposed  the  great  majority  of  all  parties  to  a  spirit  of  diffidence 
and  toleration,  which,  amiable  as  it  may  be  in  individuals,  in  a 
nation,  and  above  all  in  an  opulent  and  luxurious  nation,  is  al 
ways  too  nearly  akin  to  apathy  and  selfish  indulgence.  An  un 
manly  impatience  for  peace  became  only  not  universal.  After  as 
long  a  resistance  as  the  nature  of  our  constitution  and  national 
character  permitted,  or  even  endured,  the  government  applied  at 
length  the  only  remedy  adequate  to  the  greatness  of  the  evil,  a 
remedy  which  the  magnitude  of  the  evil  justified,  and  which 
nothing  but  an  evil  of  that  magnitude  could  justify.  At  a  high 
price  they  purchased  for  us  the  name  of  peace  at  a  time  when 
the  views  of  France  became  daily  more  and  more  incompatible 
with  our- vital  interests.  Considering  the  peace  as  a  mere  truce 
of  experiment,  wise  and  temperate  men  regarded  with  compla 
cency  the  treaty  of  Amiens,  for  the  very  reasons  that  would  have 
insured  the  condemnation  of  any  other  treaty  under  any  other 
circumstances.  Its  palpable  deficiencies  were  its  antidote  ;  or 
rather  they  formed  its  very  essence,  and  declared  at  first  sight, 
what  alone  it  was,  or  was  meant  to  be.  Any  attempt  at  that 
time,  and  in  this  treaty,  to  have  secured  Italy,  Holland,  and  the 
German  empire,  would  have  been,  in  the  literal  sense  of  the 
word,  preposterous.  The  nation  would  have  withdrawn  all  faith 
in  the  pacific  intentions  of  the  ministers,  if  the  negotiation  had 
been  broken  off  on  a  plea  of  this  kind  :  for  it  had  taken  for 
granted  the  extreme  desirableness,  nay,  the  necessity  of  a  peace, 
and,  this  once  admitted,  there  would,  no  doubt,  have  been  an  ab 
surdity  in  continuing  the  war  for  objects  which  the  war  furnished 
no  means  of  realizing.  If  the  First  Consul  had  entered  into 
stipulations  with  us  respecting  the  continent,  they  would  have 
been  observed  only  as  long  as  his  interest  from  other  causes 


ESSAY    X.  241 

might  have  dictated  ; — they  would  have  been  signed  with  as 
much  sincerity  and  observed  with  as  much  good  faith,  as  the  ar 
ticle  actually  inserted  in  the  treaty  of  Amiens,  respecting  the  in 
tegrity  of  the  Turkish  empire.  This  article  indeed  was  wisely 
insisted  on  by  us,  because  it  aflectcd  both  our  national  honor  and 
the  interests  of  our  Indian  empire  immediately  ;  and  still  more, 
perhaps,  because  this  of  all  others  was  the  most  likely  to  furnish 
an  early  proof  of  the  First  Consul's  real  dispositions.  But  deeply 
interested  in  the  fate  of  the  continent,  as  we  are  thought  to  be, 
it  would  nevertheless  have  been  most  idle  to  have  abandoned  a 
peace,  upon  the  supposition  of  its  being  at  all  desirable,  on  the 
ground  that  the  French  government  had  refused  that  which 
would  have  been  of  no  value  had  it  been  granted. 

Indeed  there  results  one  serious  disadvantage  from  insisting  on 
the  rights  and  interests  of  Austria,'  the  Empire,  Switzerland,  &c. 
in  a  treaty  between  England  and  France,  and,  as  it  should  seem, 
no  advantage  to  counterbalance  it.  For  so,  any  attack  011  those 
rights  instantly  pledges  our  character  and  national  dignity  to  com 
mence  a  war,  however  inexpedient  it  may  happen  to  be,  and 
however  hopeless  :  while  if  a  war  be  expedient,  any  attack  on 
these  countries  by  France  furnishes  a  justifiable  cause  of  war  in 
its  essential  nature,  and  independently  of  all  positive  treaty. 
Seen  in  this  light,  the  defects  of  the  treaty  of  Amiens  become  its 
real  merits.  If  the  government  of  France  made  peace  in  the 
spirit  of  peace,  then  a  friendly  intercourse  and  the  humanizing 
influences  of  commerce  and  reciprocal  hospitality  would  gradually 
bring  about  in  both  countries  the  dispositions  necessary  for  the 
calm  discussion  and  sincere  conclusion  of  a  genuine,  efficient,  and 
comprehensive  treaty.  If  the  contrary  proved  the  fact,  the 
treaty  of  Amiens  contained  in  itself  the  principles  of  its  own  dis 
solution.  It  was  what  it  ought  to  be.  If  the  First  Consul  had 
both  meant  and  dealt  fairly  by  us,  the  treaty  would  have  led  to  a 
true  settlement :  but  he  acting  as  all  prudent  men  expected  that 
he  would  act,  it  supplied  just  reasons  for  the  commencement  of 
war,  and  at  its  decease  left  us,  as  a  legacy,  blessings  that  assur 
edly  far  outweighed  our  losses  by  the  peace.  It  left  us  popular 
enthusiasm,  national  unanimity,  and  simplicity  of  object ;  and 
removed  one  inconvenience  which  cleaved  to  the  last  war,  by  at 
taching  to  the  right  objects,  and  enlisting  under  their  proper  ban 
ners,  the  scorn  and  hatred  of  slavery,  the  passion  for  freedom, 

VOL.  n.  L 


242  THE    FKIEND. 

all  the  high  thoughts  and  high  feelings  that  connect  us  with  the 
honored  names  of  past  ages ;  and  inspire  sentiments  and  lan 
guage,  to  which  our  Hampdens,  Sidneys,  and  Russels,  might  lis 
ten  without  jealousy. 

The  late  peace  then  was  negotiated  by  the  government,  rati 
fied  by  the  legislature,  and  received  by  the  nation,  as  an  experi 
ment, — as  the  only  means  of  exhibiting  such  proof  as  would  be 
satisfactory  to  the  people  in  their  then  temper  ;  whether  Bona 
parte  devoting  his  ambition  and  activity  to  the  re-establishment 
of  trade,  colonial  tranquillity,  and  social  morals,  in  France,  would 
abstain  from  insulting,  alarming  and  endangering  the  British  em 
pire.  And  these  thanks  at  least  were  due  to  the  First  Consul, 
that  he  did  not  long  delay  the  proof.  With  more  than  papal  in 
solence  he  issued  edicts  of  anathema  against  us,  and  excommuni 
cated  us  from  all  interference  in  the  affairs  of  the  continent.  He 
insulted  us  still  more  indecently  by  pertinacious  demands  respect 
ing  our  constitutional  laws  and  rights  of  hospitality  ;  by  the  of 
ficial  publication  of  Sebastiani's  report ;  and  by  a  direct  personal 
outrage  offered  in  the  presence  of  all  the  foreign  ministers  to  the 
king  of  England,  in  the  person  of  his  ambassador.  He  both  in 
sulted  and  alarmed  us  by  a  display  of  the  most  perfidious  ambi 
tion  in  the  subversion  of  the  independence  of  Switzerland,  in  the 
avowal  of  designs  against  Egypt,  Syria,  and  the  Greek  islands, 
and  in  the  mission  of  military  spies  to  Great  Britain  itself.  And 
by  forcibly  maintaining  a  French  army  in  Holland,  he  at  once 
insulted,  alarmed,  and  endangered  us.  What  can  render  a  war 
just — its  expedience  being  pre-supposed — if  insult,  repeated 
alarm,  and  danger  do  not  ?  And  how  can  it  be  expedient  for  a 
rich,  united,  and  powerful  island-empire  to  remain  in  nominal 
peace  and  unresenting  passiveness  with  an  insolent  neighbor,  who 
has  proved  that  to  wage  against  it  an  unmitigated  war  of  insult, 
alarm,  and  endangerment  is  both  his  temper  and  his  system  ? 

Many  attempts  were  made  by  Mr.  Fox  to  explain  away  the 
force  of  the  greater  number  of  the  facts  here  enumerated  :  but 
the  great  fact,  for  which  alone  they  have  either  force  or  mean 
ing,  the  great  ultimate  fact,  that  Great  Britain  had  been  insulted, 
alarmed,  and  endangered  by  France,  Mr.  Fox  himself  expressly 
admitted.  The  opposers,  however,  of  the  present  war  concentre 
the  strength  of  their  cause  in  the  following  brief  argument.  Al 
though  we  grant,  say  they,  the  grievances  set  forth  in  our  mani- 


ESSAY    X.  '    243 

festo  to  be  as  notorious  as  they  are  asserted  to  be,  yet  more  noto 
rious  they  can  not  be  than  that  other  fact  which  utterly  annuls 
them  as  reasons  for  a  war, — the  fact,  that  ministers  themselves 
regard  them  only  as  the  pompous  garnish  of  the  dish.  It  stands 
on  record,  that  Bonaparte  might  have  purchased  our  silence  for 
ever,  respecting  these  insults  and  injuries,  by  a  mere  acquiescence 
on  his  part  in  our  retention  of  Malta.  The  whole  treaty  of 
Amiens  is  little  more  than  a  perplexed  bond  of  compromise  re 
specting  Malta.  On  Malta  we  rested  the  peace  :  for  Malta  we 
renewed  the  war.  So  say  the  opposers  of  the  present  war.  As 
its  advocate  I  do  not  deny  the  fact  as  stated  by  them  ;  but  I 
hope  to  achieve  all,  and  more  than  all,  the  purposes  of  such  de 
nial,  by  an  explanation  of  the  fact.  The  difficulty  then  resolves 
itself  into  two  questions  :  first,  in  what  sense  of  the  words  can 
we  be  said  to  have  gone  to  war  for  Malta  alone  ?  Secondly, 
wherein  does  the  importance  of  Malta  consist  ?  The  answer  to 
the  second  will  be  found  in  the  notice  of  the  life  of  Sir  Alexander 
Ball,  the  liberator  and  political  father  of  the  Maltese,  contained 
in  a  subsequent  part  of  this  work  :*  while  the  attempt  to  settle 
the  first  question,  so  as  at  the  same  time  to  elucidate  the  law  of 
nations  and  its  identity  with  the  law  of  conscience,  will  occupy 
the  remainder  of  the  present  essay. 

I.    IN    WHAT    SENSE    CAN   WE    BE    AFFIRMED    TO    HAVE    RENEWED 


If  we  had  known  or  could  reasonably  have  believed,  that  the 
views  of  France  were  and  would  continue  to  be  friendly  or  nega 
tive  toward  Great  Britain,  neither  the  subversion  of  the  in 
dependence  of  Switzerland,  nor  the  maintenance  of  a  French 
army  in  Holland,  would  have  furnished  any  prudent  ground  for 
war.  For  the  only  way  by  which  we  could  have  injured  France, 
namely,  the  destruction  of  her  commerce  and  navy,  would  in 
crease  her  means  of  continental  conquests,  by  concentrating  all 
the  resources  and  energies  of  the  French  empire  in  her  military 
powers  :  while  the  losses  and  miseries  which  the  French  people 
would  suffer  in  consequence,  and  their  magnitude,  compared 
with  any  advantages  that  might  accrue  to  them  from  the  exten 
sion  of  the  name,  France,  were  facts  which,  we  knew  by  ex- 

*  See  Essays  3,  4,  5,  6,  of  the  third  Landing  Place.— Ed. 


244  THE    FKIEND. 

perience,  would  weigh  as  nothing  with  the  existing  government. 
Its  attacks  on  the  independence  of  its  continental  neighbors  be 
came  motives'  to  us  for  the  recommencement  of  hostility,  only  as 
far  as  they  gave  proofs  of  a  hostile  intention  toward  ourselves, 
and  facilitated  the  realizing  of  such  intention.  If  any  events 
had  taken  place,  increasing  the  means  of  injuring  this  country, 
even  though  these  events  furnished  no  moral  ground  of  com 
plaint  against  France  (such  .for  instance,  might  be  the  great  ex 
tension  of  her  population  and  revenue,  from  freedom  and  a  wise 
government),  much  more,  if  they  were  the  fruits  of  iniquitous 
ambition,  and  therefore  in  themselves  involved  the  probability 
of  a  hostile  intention  to  us — then,  I  say,  every  after  occurrence 
would  become  important,  and  both  a  just  and  expedient  ground 
of  war,  in  proportion,  not  to  the  importance  of  the  thing  in  itself, 
but  to  the  quantity  of  evident  proof  afforded  by  it  to  a  hostile 
design  in  the  government,  by  whose  power  our  interests  are  en 
dangered.  If  by  demanding  the  immediate  evacuation  of  Malta, 
when  he  had  himself  destroyed  the  security  of  its  actual  in 
dependence — on  his  promise  of  preserving  which  our  pacific 
promises  rested  as  on  their  sole  foundation — and  this  too,  after 
he  had  openly  avowed  such  designs  on  Egypt,  as  not  only  in  the 
opinion  of  our  ministers,  but  in  his  own  opinion,  made  it  of  the 
greatest  importance  to  this  country,  that  Malta  should  not  be  un 
der  French  influence  ; — if  by  this  conduct  the  First  Consul  ex 
hibited  a  decisive  proof  of  his  intention  to  violate  our  rights  and 
to  undermine  our  national  interests ;  then  all  his  preceding 
actions  on  the  continent  became  proofs  likewise  of  the  same  in 
tention  ;  and  any  one*  of  these  aggressions  involved  the  meaning 

*  A  hundred  cases  might  be  imagined  which  would  place  this  assertion 
in  its  true  light.  Suppose,  for  instance,  a  country,  according  to  the  laws 
of  which  a  parent  might  not  disinherit  a  son  without  having  first  convicted 
him  of  some  one  of  sundry  crimes  enumerated  in  a  specific  statute.  Caius, 
by  a  series  of  vicious  actions,  has  so  nearly  convinced  his  father  of  his  utter 
worthlessuess,  that  the  father  resolves,  on  the  next  provocation,  to  use  the 
very  first  opportunity  of  legally  disinheriting  this  son.  The  provocation 
occurs,  and  in  itself  furnishes  this  opportunity,  and  Caius  is  disinherited, 
though  for  an  action  much  less  glaring  and  intolerable  than  most  of  his 
preceding  delinquencies  had  been.  The  advocates  of  Caius  complain  that 
he  should  be  thus  punished  for  a  comparative  trifle,  so  many  worse  misde 
meanors  having  been  passed  over.  The  father  replies  :  "  This,  his  last  ac- 
tiou,  is  not  the  cause  of  the  disinheritance ;  but  the  means  of  disinheriting 


ESSAY    X.  245    . 

of  the  whole.  Which  of  them  was  to  determine  us  to  war 
would  be  decided  by  other  and  prudential  considerations.  Had 
the  First  Consul  acquiesced  in  our  detention  of  Malta,  he  would 
thereby  have  furnished  such  proof  of  pacific  intentions,  as  would 
have  led  to  further  hopes,  would  have  lessened  our  alarm  from 
his  former  acts  of  ambition,  and  relatively  to  us  have  altered  in 
some  degree  their  nature. 

It  should  never  be  forgotten,  that  a  parliament  or  national 
council  is  essentially  different  from  a  court  of  justice,  alike  in  its 
objects  and  its  duties.  In  the  latter,  the  juror  lays  aside  his 
private  knowledge  and  his  private  connections,  and  judges  ex-^ 
clusively  according  to  the  evidence  adduced  in  the  court :  in  the 
former,  the  senator  acts  upon  his  own  internal  convictions,  and 
oftentimes  upon  private  information,  which  it  would  be  impru 
dent  or  criminal  to  disclose.  Though  his  ostensible  reason  ought 
to  be  a  true  and  just  one,  it  is  by  no  means  necessary  that  it 
should  be  his  sole  or  even  his  chief  reason.  In  a  court  of  justice, 
the  juror  attends  to  the  character  and  general  intentions  of  the 
accused  party,  exclusively,  as  adding  to  the  probability  of  his 
having  or  not  having  committed  the  one  particular  action  then 
in  question.  The  senator,  on  the  contrary,  when  he  is  to  deter 
mine  on  the  conduct  of  a  foreign  power,  attends  to  particular 
actions,  chiefly  in  proof  of  character  and  existing  intentions. 
Now  there  were  many  and  very  powerful  reasons  why,  though 
appealing  to  the  former  actions  of  Bonaparte,  as  confirmations 
of  his  hostile  spirit  and  alarming  ambition,  we  should  neverthe 
less  make  Malta  the  direct  object  and  final  determinant  of  the 
war.  Had  we  gone  to  war  avowedly  for  the  independence  of 
Holland  and  Switzerland,  we  should  have  furnished  Bonaparte 
with  a  colorable  pretext  for  annexing  both  countries  immediately 
to  the  French  empire,*  which,  if  he  should  do  (as  if  his  power 

him.  I  punished  him  by  it,  rather  than  for  it.  In  truth,  it  was  not  for 
any  of  his  actions  that  I  have  thus  punished  him,  but  for  his  vices  ;  that  is, 
not  so  much  for  the  injuries  which  I  have  suffered,  as  for  the  dispositions 
which  these  actions  evinced :  for  the  insolent  and  alarming  intentions  of 
which  they  are  proofs.  Now  of  this  habitual  temper,  of  these  dangerous 
purposes,  his  last  action  is  as  true  and  complete  a  manifestation  as  any  or 
all  of  his  preceding  offences ;  and  it  therefore  may  and  must  be  taken  as 
their  common  representative." 

*  The  greater  part  of  this  essay  was  written  in  the  year  1804,  in  Malta, 
at  the  request  of  Sir  Alexander  Ball. 


246  THE    FRIEND. 

continued  he  most  assuredly  would  sooner  or  later)  by  a  mere 
act  of  violence,  and  undisguised  tyranny,  there  would  foilow  a 
moral  weakening  of  his  power  in  the  minds  of  men,  which  might 
prove  of  incalculable  advantage  to  the  independence  and  well- 
being  of  Europe  ;  but  which,  unfortunately,  for  this  very  reason, 
that  it  is  not  to  be  calculated,  is  too  often  disregarded  by  ordinary 
statesmen.  At  all  events,  it  would  have  been  made  the  plea  for 
banishing,  plundering,  and  perhaps  murdering,  numbers  of  vir 
tuous  and  patriotic  individuals,  as  being  the  partisans  of  the 
enemy  of  the  continent.  Add  to  this,  that  we  should  have  ap 
peared  to  have  rushed  into  a  war  for  objects  which  by  war  we 
could  not  hope  to  realize  ;  we  should  have  exacerbated  the  mis 
fortunes  of  the  countries  of  which  we  had  elected  ourselves  the 
champions  ;  and  the  war  would  have  appeared  a  mere  war  of 
revenge  and  reprisal,  a  circumstance  always  to  be  avoided  where 
it  is  possible.  The  ablest  and  best  men  in  the  Bataviari  republic, 
those  who  felt  the  insults  of  France  most  acutely,  and  were  suf 
fering  from  her  oppressions  the  most  severely,  entreated  our  gov 
ernment,  through  their  minister,  not  to  make  the  state  of  Hol 
land  the  great  ostensible  reason  of-  the  war.  The  Swiss  patriots, 
too,  believed  that  we  could  do  nothing  to  assist  them  at  that  time, 
and  attributed  to  our  forbearance  the  comparatively  timid  use 
which  France  has  made  hitherto  of  her  absolute  power  over  that 
country.  Besides,  Austria,  whom  the  changes  on  the  continent 
much  more  nearly  concerned  than  England,  having  refused  all 
co-operation  with  us,  there  is  reason  to  fear  that  an  opinion,  de 
structive  of  the  one  great  blessing  purchased  by  the  peace,  our 
national  unanimity,  would  have  taken  deep  root  in  the  popular 
mind,  namely,  that  these  changes  were  mere  pretexts.  Neither 
should  we  forget,  that  the  last  war  had  left  a  dislike  in  our 
countrymen  to  continental  interference,  and  a  not  unplausible 
persuasion,  that  where  a  nation  has  not  sufficient  sensibility  as 
to  its  wrongs  to  commence  a  war  against  the  aggressor,  un- 
bribed  and  ungoaded  by  Great  Britain,  a  war  begun  by  the  gov 
ernment  of  such  a  nation,  at  the  instance  of  our  government, 
has  little  chance  of  other  than  a  disastrous  result,  the  character 
and  revolutionary  resdlirces  of  the  enemy  considered.  Whatever 
may  be  the  strength  or  weakness  of  this  argument,  it  is  however 
certain,  that  there  was  a  strong  predilection  in  the  British  peo 
ple  for  a  cause  indisputably  and  peculiarly  British.  And  this 


ESSAY    X.  247 

teeling  is  not  altogether  ungrounded.  In  practical  politics  and 
the  great  expenditures  of  national  power,  we  must  not  pretend 
to  be  too  far-sighted  :  otherwise  even  a  transient  peace  would  be 
impossible  among  the  European  nations.  To  future  and  distant 
evils  we  may  always  oppose  the  various  unforeseen  events  that 
are  ripening  in  the  womb  of  the  future.  Lastly,  it  is  chiefly  to 
immediate  and  unequivocal  attacks  011  our  own  interests  and 
honor,  that  we  attach  the  notion  of  right  with  a  full  and  efficient 
feeling.  Xow,  though  we  may  be  first  stimulated  to  action  by 
probabilities  and  prospects  of  advantage,  and  though  there  is  a 
perverse  restlessness  in  human  nature,  which  renders  almost  all 
wars  popular  at  their  commencement,  yet  a  nation  always  needs 
a  sense  of  positive  right  to  steady  its  spirit.  There  is  always 
needed  some  one  reason,  short,  simple*  and  independent  of  com 
plicated  calculation,  in  order  to  give  a  sort  of  muscular  strength 
to  the  public  mind,  when  the  power  that  results  from  enthusiasm, 
animal  spirits,  arid  the  charm  of  novelty,  shall  have  evaporated. 
There  is  no  feeling  more  honorable  to  our  nature,  and  few  that 
strike  deeper  root  when  our  nature  is  happily  circumstanced,  than 
the  jealousy  concerning  a  positive  right,  independent  of  an  im 
mediate  interest.  To  surrender,  in  our  national  character,  the 
merest  trifle  that  is  strictly  our  right,  the  merest  rock  on  which 
the  waves  will  scarcely  permit  the  sea-fowl  to  lay  its  eggs,  at  the 
demand  of  an  insolent  and  powerful  rival,  on  a  shopkeeper's  cal 
culation  of  loss  and  gain,  is  in  its  final,  and  assuredly  not  very 
distant  consequences,  a  loss  of  every  thing — of  national  spirit,  of 
national  independence,  and  with  these,  of  the  very  wealth  for 
which  the  low  calculation  was  made.  This  feeling  in  individuals, 
indeed,  and  in  private  life,  is  to  be  sacrificed  to  religion.  Say 
rather,  that  by  religion,  it  is  transmuted  into  a  higher  virtue, 
growing  on  a  higher  and  engrafted  branch,  yet  nourished  from 
the  same  root ;  that  it  remains  in  its  essence  the  same  spirit,  but 

Made  pure  by  thought,  and  naturalized  in  heaven ; 

and  he  who  can  not  perceive  the  moral  differences  of  national  and 
individual  duties,  comprehends  neither  the  one  nor  the  other,  and 
is  not  a  whit  the  better  Christian  for  being  a  bad  patriot.  Con 
sidered  nationally,  it  is  as  if  the  captain  of  a  man-of-war  should 
strike  and  surrender  his  colors  under  the  pretence,  that  it  would 
be  folly  to  risk  the  lives  of  so  many  good  Christian  sailors  for  the 


248  THE    FKIEND. 

sake  of  a  few  yards  of  coarse  canvas  !     Of  such  reasoners  I  take 
an  indignant  leave  in  the  words  of  an  obscure  poet : — 

Fear  never  wanted  arguments  :  you  do 
Keason  yourselves  into  a  careful  bondage, 
Circumspect  only  to  your  misery. 
I  could  urge  freedom,  charters,  country,  laws, 
Gods,  and  religion,  and  such  precious  names — 
Nay,  what  you  value  higher,  wealth !     But  that 
You  sue  for  bondage,  yielding  to  demands 
As  impious  as  they're  insolent,  and  have 
Only  this  sluggish  aim, — to  perish  full  !* 

And  here  it  is  necessary  to  animadvert  on  a  principle  asserted 
by  Lord  Minto  (in  his  speech,  June  6th,  1803,  and  afterwards 
published  at  full  length),  that  France  had  an  undoubted  right  to 
insist  on  our  abandonment  at  Malta,  a  right  not  given,  but  like 
wise  not  abrogated,  by  the  treaty  of  Amiens.  Surely  in  this 
effort  of  candor,  his  Lordship  must  have  forgotten  the  circum 
stances  on  which  he  exerted  it.  The  case  is  simply  thus  :  the 
British  government  was  convinced,  and  the  French  government 
admitted  the  justice  of  the  conviction,  that  it  was  of  the  utmost 
importance  to  our  interests,  that  Malta  should  remain  unin 
fluenced  by  France.  The  French  government  bound  itself  down 
by  a  solemn  treaty,  that  it  would  use  its  best  endeavors,  in  con 
junction  with  us,  to  secure  this  independence.  This  promise  was 
no  act  of  liberality,  no  generous  free-gift,  on  the  part  of  France — 
No  !  we  purchased  it  at  a  high  price.  We  disbanded  our  forces, 
we  dismissed  our  sailors,  and  we  gave  up  the  best  part  of  the 
fruits  of  our  naval  victories.  Can  it  therefore  with  a  shadow  of 
plausibility  be  affirmed,  that  the  right  to  insist  on  our  evacuation 
of  the  island  was  unaltered  by  the  treaty  of  Amiens,  when  this 
demand  was  strictly  tantamount  to  our  surrender  of  all  the  ad 
vantages  which  we  had  bought  of  France  at  so  high  a  price, — 
tantamount  to  a  direct  breach  on  her  part,  not  merely  of  a  solemn 
treaty,  but  of  an  absolute  bargain  ?  It  was  not  only  the  perfidy 
of  unprincipled  ambition — the  demand  was  the  fraudulent  trick 
of  a  sharper.  For  what  did  France  ?  She  sold  us  the  indepen 
dence  of  Malta  ; — then  exerted  her  power,  and  annihilated  the 
very  possibility  of  that  independence,  and  lastly,  demanded  of  us 
that  we  should  leave  it  bound  hand  and  foot  for  her  to  seize 
*  Cartwright.  The  Siege,  or  Love's  Convert.  Act  I.  sc.  1. — Ed. 


ESSAY    X.  249 

without  trouble,  whenever  her  ambitious  projects  led  her  to  re 
gard  such  seizure  as  expedient.  We  bound  ourselves  to  surrender 
it  to  the  Knights  of  Malta — riot  surely  to  Joseph,  Robert,  or 
Nicholas,  but  to  a  known  order,  clothed  with  certain  powers,  and 
capable  of  exerting  them  in  consequence  of  certain  revenues. 
"We  found  no  such  order.  The  men  indeed  and  the  name  we 
found  :  and  even  so,  if  we  had  purchased  Sardinia  of  its  sovereign 
for  so  many  millions  of  money,  which  through  our  national  credit, 
and  from  the  equivalence  of  our  national  paper  to  gold  and  silver, 
he  might  have  agreed  to  receive  in  bank  notes,  and  if  he  had  re 
ceived  them — doubtless,  he  would  have  the  bank-notes,  even 
though  immediately  after  our  payment  of  them  we  had  for  this 
very  purpose  forced  the  Bank  company  to  break.  But  would  he 
have  received  the  debt  due  to  him  ?  It  is  nothing  more  or  less 
than  a  practical  pun,  as  wicked  though  not  quite  so  ludicrous,  as 
the  (in  all  senses)  execrable  pun  of  Earl  Godwin,  who  requesting 
basium  (a  kiss)  from  the  archbishop,  thereupon  seized  on  the 
archbishop's  manor  of  Baseham. 

A  treaty  is  a  writ  of  mutual  promise  between  two  independent 
states,  and  the  law  of  promise  is  the  same  to  nations  as  to  indi 
viduals.  It  is  to  be  sacredly  performed  by  each  party  in  that 
sense  in  which  it  knew  arid  permitted  the  other  party  to  under 
stand  it,  at  the  time  of  the  contract.  Any  thing  short  of  this  is 
criminal  deceit  in  individuals,  and  in  governments  impious  perfidy. 
After  the  conduct  of  France  in  the  affair  of  the  guarantees,  and 
of  the  revenues  of  the  order,  we  had  the  same  right  to  preserve 
the  island  independent  of  France  by  a  British  garrison,  as  a  law 
ful  creditor  has  to  the  household  goods  of  a  fugitive  and  dishonest 
debtor. 

One  other  assertion  made  by  Lord  Minto,  in  the  same  speech, 
bears  so  immediately  on  the  plan  of  The  Friend,  as  far  as  it  pro 
posed  to  investigate  the  principle  of  international,  no  less  than  of 
private  morality,  that  I  feel  myself  in  some  degree  under  an 
obligation  to  notice  it.  A  treaty,  says  his  lordship,  ought  to  be 
strictly  observed  by  a  nation  in  its  literal  sense,  even  though  the 
utter  ruin  of  that  nation  should  be  the  certain  and  foreknown 
consequence  of  that  observance.  Previously  to  any  remarks  of 
my  own  on  this  high  flight  of  diplomatic  virtue,  we  will  hear 
what  Harrington  has  said  on  this  subject  :  "  A  man  may  devote 
himself  to  death  or  destruction  to  save  a  nation  ;  but  no  nation 

L* 


250  THE    FKIEND. 

will  devote  itself  to  death  or  destruction  to  save  mankind.     Ma- 
chiavel  is  decried  for  saying,  '  that  no  consideration  is  to  be  had 
of  what  is  just  or  unjust,  of  what  is  merciful  or  cruel,  of  what  is 
honorable  or  ignominious,  in  case  it  be  to  save  a  state  or  to  pre 
serve  liberty  :'  which  as  to  the  manner  of  expression  may  per 
haps  be  crudely  spoken.     But  to  imagine  that  a  nation  will  de 
vote  itself  to  death  or  destruction  any  more  after  faith  given,  or 
an  engagement  thereto  tending,  than  ijf  there  had  been  no  en 
gagement  made  or  faith  given,  were  not  piety  but  folly."" — Crudely 
spoken  indeed,  and  not  less  crudely  thought  ;  nor  is  the  matter 
much  mended  by  the  commentator.      Yet  every  man,  who  is  at 
all  acquainted  with  the  world  and  its  past  history,  knows  that 
the  fact  itself  is  truly  stated  :   and  what  is  more  important  in  the 
present  argument,  he  can  not  find  in  his  heart  a  full,  deep,  and 
downright   verdict,   that  it  should  be    otherwise.      The    conse 
quences  of  this  perplexity  in  the  moral  feelings  are  not  seldom 
extensively  injurious.     For  men  hearing  the  duties  which  would 
be  binding  on  two  individuals  living  under  the  same  laws  in 
sisted  on  as  equally  obligatory  on  two  independent  states,  in  ex 
treme  cases,  where  they  see  clearly  the  impracticability  of  realiz 
ing  such  a  notion, — and  having  at  the  same  time  a  dim  half- 
consciousness,  that  two  states  can  never  be  placed  exactly  on  the 
same  ground  as  two  individuals, — relieve  themselves  from  their 
perplexity  by  cutting  what  they  can  not  untie,  and  assert  that 
national  policy  can  not  in  all  cases  be  subordinated  to  the  laws 
of  morality  ; — in  other  words,  that  a  government  may  act  with 
injustice,  and  yet  remain  blameless.     This  assertion  was  hazard 
ed, — I  record  it  with  unfeigned  regret, — by  a  minister  of  state,  on 
the  affair  of  Copenhagen.     Tremendous  assertion  !  that  would 
render  every  complaint,  which  we  make,  of  the  abominations  of 
the  French  tyrant,  hypocrisy,  or  mere  incendiary  declamation  for 
the  simple-headed  multitude.     But,  thank  God  !  it  is  as  unne 
cessary  and  unfounded,  as  it  is  tremendous.     For  what  is  a  treaty  ? 
A  voluntary  contract  between  two  nations.     So  we  will  state  it 
in  the  first  instance.     Now  it  is  an  impossible  case,  that  any  na 
tion  can  be  supposed  by  any  other  to  have  intended  its  own  ab 
solute   destruction  in  a  treaty,  which   its  interests  alone  could 
have  prompted  it  to  make.      The  very  thought  is  self-contradic 
tory.     Not  only  Athens  (we  will  say)  could  not  have  intended 
this  to  have  been  understood  in  any  specific  promise  made  to 


ESSAY    X.  251 

Sparta  ;  but  Sparta  could  never  have  imagined  that  Athens  had 
so  intended  it.  And  Athens  itself  must  have  known,  that  had 
she  even  affirmed  the  contrary,  Sparta  could  not  have  believed — 
nay,  would  have  been  under  a  moral  obligation  not  to  have  be 
lieved  her.  Were  it  possible  to  suppose  such  a  case — for  in 
stance,  such  a  treaty  made  by  a  single  besieged  town,  under  an 
independent  government  as  that  of  Numantia — it  becomes  no 
longer  a  state,  but  the  act  of  a  certain  numbe^  of  individuals 
voluntarily  sacrificing  themselves,  each  to  preserve  his  separate 
honor.  For  the  state  was  already  destroyed  by  the  circumstances 
which  alone  could  make  such  an  engagement  conceivable. — But 
we  have  said,  nations. — Applied  to  England  and  France,  rela 
tively  to  treaties,  this  is  but  a  form  of  speaking.  The  treaty  is 
really  made  by  some  half-dozen,  or  perhaps  half  a  hundred  in 
dividuals,  possessing  the  government  of  these  countries.  Now 
it  is  a  universally  admitted  part  of  the  law  of  nations,  that  an 
engagement  entered  into  by  a  minister  with  a  foreign  power, 
when  it  is  known  to  this  power  that  the  minister  in  so  doing 
has  exceeded  and  contravened  his  instructions,  is  altogether  nu 
gatory.  And  is  it  to  be  supposed  for  a  moment,  that  a  whole 
nation,  consisting  perhaps  of  twenty  millions  of  human  souls, 
could  ever  have  invested  a  few  individuals,  whom  altogether 
for  the  promotion  of  its  welfare  it  had  intrusted  with  its  govern 
ment,  with  the  right  of  signing  away  its  existence  ?# 

*  See  Paley's  Moral  and  Political  Philosophy,  B.  vi.  c.  12. — Ed. 


ESSAY  XI. 

Arnicas  reprehensio?ies  gratissime-accipiamus  oportet ;  etiam  si  reprehendi 
non  mcruit  opimo  nostra,  vel  lianc  propter  causam,  quod  recte  dffendi  potest. 
Si  vcro  infirmitas  vel  humana  vcl  propria,  etiam  cum  veracitcr  arguitur,  non 
potest  non  aliquantulum  contristari,  mclius  tumor  dolet  dum  curatur,  quam 
dam  et  parcitur  et  non  sanatur.  Hoc  enim  est  quod  acute  v idit,  qui  dixit : 
utiliores  csse plcrumquc  inimicos  objurgantes,  quam  amicos  objurgare  metu- 
entes.  llli  cnim  dum  rixantur,  dlcunt  aliquando  vera  quae.  corrigamus :  isti 
autem  minorem,  quam  oportet,  cxhibcnt  justitue  libertatem,  dum  amicitice  ti- 
ment  cxasperare  dulcedincm.  AUGUSTIX.  HIERONYMO.* 

Censures,  offered  in  friendliness,  we  ought  to  receive  with  gratitude  : 
yea,  though  our  opinions  did  not  merit  censure,  we  should  still  be  thankful 
for  the  attack  on  them,  were  it  only  that  it  gives  us  an  opportunity  of  suc 
cessfully  defending  the  same.  For  never  doth  an  important  truth  spread 
its  roots  so  wide  or  clasp  the  soil  so  stubbornly,  as  when  it  has  braved  the 
winds  of  controversy.  There  is  a  stirring  and  a  far-heard  music  sent  forth 
from  the  tree  of  sound  knowledge,  when  its  branches  are  fighting  with  tho 
Btorm,  which  passing  onward  shrills  out  at  once  truth's  triumph  and  its 
own  defeat.  But  if  the  infirmity  of  human  nature,  or  of  our  own  constitu 
tional  temperament,  can  not,  even  when  we  have  been  fairly  convicted  of 
error,  but  suffer  some  small  mortification,  yet  better  suffer  pain  from  its 
extirpation,  than  from  the  consequences  of  its  continuance,  and  of  the  false 
tenderness  that  has  withholden  the  remedy.  This  is  what  the  acute  ob 
server  had  in  his  mind,  who  said,  that  upbraiding  enemies  were  not  sel 
dom  more  profitable  than  friends  afraid  to  find  fault.  For  the  former 
amidst  their  quarrelsome  invectives  may  chance  on  some  home  truths,  by 
which  we  may  amend  ourselves  in  consequence ;  while  the  latter  from  an 
over-delicate  apprehension  of  ruffling  the  smooth  surface  of  friendship 
shrink  from  its  duties,  and  from  the  manly  freedom  which  truth  and  justice 
demand. 

ONLY  a  few  privileged  individuals  are  authorized  to  pass  into 
the  theatre  without  stopping  at  the  door-keeper's  box  ;  but  every 

*  August.  Op.  Tom.  ii.  Epist.  xv.  Ed.  Basil.  The  original  of  the  former 
part  of  the  quotation,  which  is  a  good  deal  altered,  stands  thus  :—Ut  et  ego 
amicissimam  reprehensionem  gratlsslme  accipiam,  etiam  si  repreJiendi  non 
meruit  quod  recte  defendi  potest.  *  *  *  *  Si  vero  infirmitas  vclut  hu 
mana  mea,  etiam  cum  veraciter  argiior,  non  potest  non  aliquantulum  contris- 
tari,  melius  capitis  tumor  dolet,  d'c. — Ed. 


ESSAY    XI.  253 

man  of  decent  appearance  may  put  down  the  play-price  there,  and 
thenceforward  has  as  good  a  right  as  the  managers  themselves 
not  only  to  see  and  hear,  as  far  as  his  place  in  the  house,  and  his 
own  ears  and  eyes  permit  him,  but  likewise  to  express  audibly 
his  approbation  or  disapprobation  of  what  may  be  going  forward 
on  the  stage.  If  his  feelings  happen  to  be  in  unison  with  those 
of  the  audience  in  general,  he  may  without  breach  of  decorum 
persevere  in  his  notices  of  applause  or  dislike,  till  the  \vish  of  the 
house  is  complied  with.  If  he  finds  himself  unsupported,  he  rests 
contented  with  having  once  exerted  his  common,  right,  and  on 
that  occasion  at  least  gives  no  further  interruption  to  the  amuse 
ment  of  those  who  feel  differently  from  him.  So  it  is,  or  so  it 
should  be,  in  literature.  A  few  extraordinary  minds  may  be  al 
lowed  to  pass  a  mere  opinion  ; — though  in  point  of  fact  those, 
who  alone  are  entitled  to  this  privilege,  are  ever  the  last  to  avail 
themselves  of  it.  Add  too,  that  even  the  mere  opinions  of  such 
men  may  in  general  be  regarded  either  as  promissory  notes,  or  as 
receipts  referring  to  a  former  payment.  But  every  man's  opinion 
has  a  right  to  pass  into  the  common  auditory,  if  his  reason  for 
the  opinion  is  paid  down  at  the  same  time :  for  arguments  are 
the  sole  current  coin  of  intellect.  The  degree  of  influence  to 
which  the  opinion  is  entitled  should  be  proportioned  to  the  weight 
and  value  of  the  reasons  for  it ;  and  whether  these  are  shillings 
or  pounds  sterling,  the  man,  who  has  given  them,  remains 
blameless,  provided  he  contents  himself  with  the  place  to  which 
they  have  entitled  him,  and  does  not  attempt  by  strength  of 
lungs  to  counterbalance  its  disadvantages,  or  expect  to  exert  as 
immediate  an  influence  in  the  back  seats  of  the  upper  gallery,  as 
if  he  had  paid  in  gold  and  been  seated  in  the  stage  box. 

But  unfortunately, — and  here  commence  the  points  of  differ 
ence  between  the  theatric  and  the  literary  public, — in  the  great 
theatre  of  literature  there  are  no  authorized  door-keepers  :  for  our 
anonymous  critics  are  self-elected.  I  shall  not  fear  the  charge 
of  calumny  if  I  add  that  they  have  lost  all  credit  with  wise  men 
by  unfair  dealing  :  such  as  their  refusal  to  receive  an  honest 
man's  money,  that  is,  his  argument,  because  they  anticipate  and 
dislike  his  opinion,  while  others  of  suspicious  character  and  the 
most  unseemly  appearance  are  suffered  to  pass  without  payment, 
or  by  virtue  of  orders  which  they  have  themselves  distributed  to 
known  partisans.  Sometimes  the  honest  man's  intellectual  coin 


254  THE    FRIEND. 

is  refused  under  pretence  that  it  is  light  or  counterfeit,  without 
any  proof  given  either  by  the  money  scales,  or  by  sounding  the 
coin  in  dispute  together  with  one  of  known  goodness.  We  may 
carry  the  metaphor  still  farther.  It  is  by  no  means  a  rare  case, 
that  the  money  is  returned  because  it  had  a  different  sound  from 
that  of  a  counterfeit,  the  brassy  blotches  on  which  seemed  to 
blush  for  the  impudence  of  the  silver  wash  in  which  they  were 
misled,  and  rendered  the  mock  coin  a  lively  emblem  of  a  lie  self- 
detected.  Still  oftener  does  the  rejection  take  place  by  a  mere 
act  of  insolence,  and  the  blank  assertion  that  the  candidate's 
money  is  light  or  bad,  is  justified  by  a  second  assertion  that  he  is 
a  fool  or  knave  for  offering  it. 

The  second  point  of  difference  explains  the  preceding,  and  ac 
counts  both  for  the  want  of  established  door-keepers  in  the  audi 
tory  of  literature,  and  for  the  practices  of  those,  who  under  the 
name  of  reviewers  volunteer  this  office.  There  is  no  royal  mint 
age  for  arguments,  no  ready  means  by  which  all  men  alike,  who 
possess  common  sense,  may  determine  their  value  and  intrinsic 
worth  at  the  first  sight  or  sound.  Certain  forms  of  natural  logic 
indeed  there  are,  the  inobservance  of  which  is  decisive  against  an 
argument ;  but  the  strictest  adherence  to  them  is  no  proof  of  its 
actual,  though  an  indispensable  condition  of  its  possible,  validity. 
In  the  arguer's  own  conscience  there  is,  no  doubt,  a  certain  value, 
and  an  infallible  criterion  of  it,  which  applies  to  all  arguments 
equally  ;  and  this  is  the  sincere  conviction  of  the  mind  itself. 
But  for  those  to  whom  it  is  offered,  there  are  only  conjectural 
marks  ;  yet  such  as  will  seldom  mislead  any  man  of  plain  sense, 
who  is  both  honest  and  observant. 

These  characteristics  I  have  attempted  to  comprise  in  a  pre 
vious  part  of  this  work,^  and  to  describe  them  more  at  large  in 
the  essays  that  follow,  on  the  communication  of  truth.  If  the 
honest  warmth,  which  results  from  the  strength  of  the  particular 
conviction,  be  tempered  by  the  modesty  which  belongs  to  the 
sense  of  general  fallibility  ;  if  the  emotions,  which  accompany  all 
vivid  perceptions,  are  preserved  distinct  from  the  expression  of 
personal  passions,  and  from  appeals  to  them  in  the  heart  of 
others  ;  if  the  reasoner  asks  no  respect  for  the  opinion,  as  his 
opinion,  but  only  in  proportion  as  it  is  acknowledged  by  that  rea 
son,  which  is  common  to  all  men ;  and,  lastly,  if  he  supports  an 
*P.4l.— #<£ 


ESSAY    XI.  255 

opinion  on  no  subject  which  he  has  not  previously  examined,  and 
furnishes  proof  both  that  he  possesses  the  means  of  inquiry  by  his 
education  or  the  nature  of  his  pursuits,  and  that  he  has  endeav 
ored  to  avail  himself  of  those  means  ;  then,  and  with  these  con 
ditions,  every  human  being  is  authorized  to  make  public  the 
grounds  of  any  opinion  which  he  holds,  and  of  course  the  opinion 
itself,  as  the  object  of  them.  Consequently,  it  is  the  duty  of  all 
men,  not  always  indeed  to  attend  to  him,  but,  if  they  do,  to  at 
tend  to  him  with  respect,  and  with  a  sincere  as  well  as  apparent 
toleration.  I  should  oilend  against  my  own  laws,  if  I  disclosed  at 
present  the  nature  of  my  convictions  concerning  the  degree,  in 
which  this  virtue  of  toleration  is  possessed  and  practised  by  the 
majority  of  my  contemporaries  and  countrymen.  But  if  the  con 
trary  temper  is  felt  and  shown  in  instances  where  all  those  con 
ditions  have  been,  observed,  which  have  been  stated  at  full  in  the 
preliminary  essays  that  form  the  introduction  to  this  work,  and 
the  chief  of  which  I  have  just  now  recapitulated  ;  Ihave  no  hesi 
tation  in  declaring  that  whatever  the  opinion  may  be,  and  how 
ever  opposite  to  the  hearer's  or  reader's  previous  persuasions,  one 
or  other  of  all  of  the  following  defects  must  be  taken  for  granted. 
Either  the  intolerant  person  is  not  master  of  the  grounds  on 
which  his  own  faith  is  built ;  which,  therefore,  neither  is  nor  can 
be  his  own  faith,  though  it  may  very  easily  be  his  imagined  in 
terest,  and  his  habit  of  thought.  In  this  case  he  is  angry,  not  at 
the  opposition  to  truth,  but  at  the  interruption  of  his  own  indo 
lence  and  intellectual  slumber,  or  possibly  at  the  apprehension, 
that  his  temporal  advantages  are  threatened,  or  at  least  the  ease 
of  mind,  in  which  he  had  been  accustomed  to  enjoy  them.  Or, 
secondly,  he  has  no  love  of  truth  for  its  own  sake  ;  no  reverence 
for  the  divine  command  to  seek  earnestly  after  it,  which  com 
mand,  if  it  had  not  been  so  often  and  solemnly  given  by  revela 
tion,  is  yet  involved  and  expressed  in  the  gift  of  reason,  and  in 
the  dependence  of  all  our  virtues  on  its  development.  He  has  no 
moral  and  religious  awe  for  freedom  of  thought,  though  accom 
panied  both  by  sincerity  and  humility  ;  nor  for  the  right  of  free 
communication  which  is  ordained  by  God,  together  with  that 
freedom,  if  it  be  true  that  God  has  ordained  us  to  live  in  society, 
and  has  made  the  progressive  improvement  of  all  and  each  of  us 
to  depend  on  the  reciprocal  aids,  which  directly  or  indirectly  each 
supplies  to  all,  and  all  to  each.  But  if  his  alarm  and  his  conse- 


256  THE    FRIEND. 

quent  intolerance,  are  occasioned  by  his  eternal  rather  than  tem 
poral  interests,  and  if,  as  is  most  commonly  the  case,  he  does  not 
deceive  himself  on  this  point,  gloomy  indeed,  and  erroneous  be 
yond  idolatry,  must  have  been  his  notions  of  the  Supreme  Being  ! 
For  surely  the  poor  heathen  who  represents  to  himself  the  divine 
attributes  of  wisdom,  justice,  and  mercy,  under  multiplied  and 
forbidden  symbols  in  the  powers  of  nature  or  the  souls  of  extraor 
dinary  men,  practises  a  superstition  which  (though  at  once  the 
cause  and  effect  of  blindness  and  sensuality)  is  less  incompati 
ble  with  inward  piety  and  true  religious  feeling  than  the  creed 
of  that  man,  who  in  the  spirit  of  his  practice,  though  not  in  di 
rect  words,  loses  sight  of  all  these  attributes,  and  substitutes  in 
stead  of  the  adoptive  and  cheerful  boldness,  which  our  new  al 
liance  with  God  requires,"  a  "  servile  and  thrall-like  fear."*" 
Such  fear-ridden  and  thence  angry  believers,  or  rather  acquies 
cents,  would  do  well  to  re-peruse  the  book  01*  Job,  and  observe 
the  sentence  passed  by  the  All-just  on  the  friends  of  the  sufferer, 
who  had  hoped,  like  venal  advocates,  to  purchase  the  favor  of 
God  by  uttering  truths  of  which  in  their  own  hearts  they  had 
neither  conviction  nor  comprehension.  The  truth  from,  the  lips 
did  not  atone  for  the  lie  in  the  heart,  while  the  rashness  of  agony 
in  the  searching  and  bewildered  complainant,  was  forgiven  in 
consideration  of  his  sincerity  and  integrity  in  not  disguising  the 
true  dictates  of  his  reason  and  conscience,  but  avowing  his  inca 
pability  of  solving  a  problem  by  his  reason,  which  belbre  the 
Christian  dispensation  the  Almighty  was  pleased  to  solve  only 
by  declaring  it  to  be  beyond  the  limits  of  human  reason.  Having 
insensibly  passed  into  a  higher  and  more  serious  style  than  I  had 
first  intended,  I  will  venture  to  appeal  to  these  self-obscurants, 
wrhose  faith  dwells  in  the  land  of  the  shadow  of  darkness,  these 

*  Milton  Of  Reformation  i>i  England,  B.  i.  sub  initio.  '  For  in  very  deed, 
the  superstitious  man  by  his  good-will  is  an  atheist ;  but  being  scared  from 
thence  by  the  pangs  and  gripes  of  a  boiling  -conscience,  all  in  a  pudder 
shuffles  up  to  himself  such  a  God  and  such  a  worship  as  is  most  agreeable 
to  remedy  his  fear  :  which  fear  of  his  as  also  his  hope,  fixed  only  upon  the 
flesh,  renders  likewise  the  whole  faculty  of  his  apprehension  carnal ;  and  all 
the  inward  acts  of  worship  issuing  from  the  native  strength  of  the  soul,  run 
out  lavishly  to  the  upper  skin,  and  there  harden  into  a  crust  of  formality 
Hence  men  came  to  scan  the  Scriptures  by  the  letter,  and  in  the  covenant 
of  our  redemption  magnified  the  external  signs  more  than  the  quickening 
power  of  the  spirit.' — Ibid. — Ed. 


ESSAY    XII.  257 

papists  without  a  pope,  and  protestants  who  protest  only  against 
all  protesting  ;  and  will  appeal  to  them  in  words  which  yet  more 
immediately  concern  them  as  Christians,  in  the  hope  that  they 
will  lend  a  fearless  ear  to  the  learned  apostle,  when  he  both  as 
sures  and  labors  to  persuade  them  that  they  were  called  in 
Christ  to  all  perfectness  in  spiritual  knowledge  and  full  assurance 
of  understanding  in  the  mystery  of  God.  There  can  be  no  end 
without  means  :  and  God  furnishes  110  means  that  exempt  us 
from  the  task  and  duty  of  joining  our  own  best  endeavors.  The 
original  stock,  or  wild  olive-tree  of  our  natural  powers,  was  not 
given  us  to  be  burned  or  blighted,  but  to  be  grafted  on.  We  are 
not  only  not  forbidden  to  examine  and  propose  our  doubts,  so  it 
be  done  with  humility  and  proceed  from  a  real  desire  to  know 
the  truth  ;  but  we  are  repeatedly  commanded  so  to  do  ;  and 
with  a  most  unchristian  spirit  must  that  man  have  read  the  pre 
ceding  passages,  if  he  can  interpret  any  one  sentence  as  having 
for  its  object  to  excuse  a  too  numerous  class,  who,  to  use  the 
words  of  St.  Augustine,  qucerunt  non  ut  fidem  sed  ut  infidelita- 
tem  inveniant ; — such  as  examine  not  to  find  reasons  for  faith, 
but  pretexts  for  infidelity. 


ESSAY    XII. 

Such  is  the  iniquity  of  men,  that  they  suck  in  opinions  as  wild  asses  do 
the  •wind,  without  distinguishing  the  wholesome  from  the  corrupted  air, 
and  then  live  upon  it  at  a  venture :  and  when  all  their  confidence  is  built 
upon  zeal  and  mistake,  yet  therefore,  because  they  are  zealous  and  mis 
taken,  they  are  impatient  of  contradiction.  JEREMY  TAYLOR.* 

"Ir,"  observes  the  eloquent  bishop  in  the  work,  from  which 
my  motto  is  selected,  "  an  opinion  plainly  and  directly  brings  in 
a  crime,  as  if  a  man  preaches  treason  or  sedition,  his  opinion  is 
not  his  excuse.  A  man  is  nevertheless  a  traitor  because  he  be 
lieves  it  lawful  to  commit  treason ;  and  a  man  is  a  murderer  if 
he  kills  his  brother  unjustly,  although  he  should  think  that  he 

*  Epist.  Dedicat.  to  the  Liberty  of  Prophesying.  Vol.  vii.  p.  409.  He- 
ber's  edit.— Ed. 


258  THE    FRIEND. 

was  doing  God  good  service  thereby.  Matters  of  fact  are  equally 
judicable,  whether  the  principle  of  them  be  from,  within  or  from 
without."* 

To  dogmatize  a  crime,  that  is,  to  teach  it  as  a  doctrine,  is 
itself  a  crime,  great  or  small  as  the  crime  dogmatized  is  more  or 
less  palpably  so.  "  You  say,"  said  Sir  John  Cheke,  addressing 
himself  to  the  papists  of  his  day,  "  that  you  rebel  for  your  reli 
gion.  First  tell  me,  what  religion  is  that  which  teaches  you  to 
rebel."  As  my  object  in  the  present  section  is  to  treat  of  toler 
ance  and  intolerance  in  the  public  bearings  of  opinions  and  their 
propagation,  I  shall  embrace  this  opportunity  of  selecting  the 
two  passages,  which  I  have  been  long  inclined  to  consider  as  the 
most  eloquent  in  our  English  literature,  though  each  in  a  very 
different  style  of  eloquence,  as  indeed  the  authors  were  as  dis 
similar  in  their  bias,  if  not  in  their  faith,  as  two  bishops  of  the 
same  church  can  well  be  supposed  to  have  been.  I  think  too,  I 
may  venture  to  add,  that  both  the  extracts  will  be  new  to  a  very 
great  majority  of  my  readers.  For  the  length  I  make  no  apology. 
It  was  part  of  my  plan  to  allot  two  essays  of  The  Friend,  the 
one  to  a  selection  from  our  prose  writers,  and  the  other  from  our 
poets  ;  but  in  both  cases  from  works  that  do  not  occur  in  our 
ordinary  reading. 

The  following  passages  are  both  on  the  same  subject ; — the 
first  from  Jeremy  Taylor ; — the  second  from  Bishop  Bedell. 

1 .  The  rise  and  progress  of  a  controversy,  from  the  speculative 
opinion  of  an  individual,  to  the  revolution  or  intestine  war  of  a 
nation. 

"  This  is  one  of  the  inseparable  characters  of  a  heretic  ;  he 
sets  his  whole  communion  and  all  his  charity  upon  his  article  ; 
for  to  be  zealous  in  the  schism,  that  is  the  characteristic  of  a 
good  man,  that  is  his  note  of  Christianity  ;  in  all  the  rest  he 
excuses  you  or  tolerates  you,  provided  you  be  a  true  believer ; 
then  you  are  one  of  the  faithful,  a  good  man  arid  a  precious,  you 
are  of  the  congregation  of  the  saints,  and  one  of  the  godly.  All 
solifidians  do  thus ;  and  all  that  do  thus  are  solifidians,  the 
church  of  "Rome  herself  not  excepted  ;  for  though  in  words  she 
proclaims  the  possibility  of  keeping  all  the  commandments  ;  yet 
she  dispenses  easier  with,  him  that  breaks  them  all,  than  with 
him  that  speaks  one  word  against  any  of  her  articles,  though  but 
*  Liberty  of  Propb.  s.  13. — Ed. 


ESSAY    XII.  259 

the  least ;  even  the  eating  of  fish  and  forbidding  flesh  in  Lent. 
So  that  it  is  faith  they  regard  more  than  chanty,  a  right  belief 
more  than  a  holy  life  ;  and  for  this  you  shall  be  with  them  upon 
terms  easy  enough,  provided  you  go  not  a  hair's  breadth  from 
any  thing  of  her  belief.  For  if  you  do,  they  have  provided  for 
you  two  deaths  and  two  fires,  both  inevitable  and  one  eternal. 
And  this  certainly  is  one  of  the  greatest  evils,  of  which  the 
church  of  Home  is  guilty  :  for  this  in  itself  is  the  greatest  and 
unworthiest  uncharitableness.  But  the  procedure  is  of  great  use 
to  their  ends.  For  the  greatest  part  of  Christians  are  those  that 
can  not  consider  things  leisurely  and  wisely,  searching  their  bot 
toms  and  discovering  their  causes,  or  foreseeing  events  which  are 
to  come  after  ;  but  are  carried  away  by  fear  and  hope,  by  affec 
tion  and  prepossession  :  and  therefore  the  Roman  doctors  are 
careful  to  govern  them  as  they  will  be  governed.  If  you  dis 
pute,  you  gain,  it  may  be,  one,  and  lose  five  ;  but  if  you  threaten 
them  with  damnation,  you  keep  them  in  fetters  ;  for  they  that 
are  in  fear  of  death,  are  all  their  Lifetime  in  bondage,*  saith 
the  apostle  :  and  there  is  in  the  world  nothing  so  potent  as  fear 
of  the  two  deaths  which  are  the  two  arms  and  grapples  of  iron 
by  which  the  church  of  Rome  takes  and  keeps  her  timorous  or 
conscientious  proselytes.  The  easy  protestant  calls  upon  you 
from  Scripture  to  do  your  duty,  to  build  a  holy  life  upon  a  holy 
faith,  the  faith  of  the  apostles  and  first  disciples  of  our  Lord  :  he 
tells  you  if  you  err,  and  teaches  ye  the  truth  ;  and  if  ye  will  obey, 
it  is  well ;  if  not,  he  tells  you  of  your  sin,  and  that  all  sin  de 
serves  the  wrath  of  God  ;  but  judges  no  man's  person,  much  less 
any  states  of  men.  lie  knows  that  God's  judgments  are  right 
eous  and  true  ;  but  he  knows  also,  that  his  mercy  absolves  many 
persons,  who,  in  his  just  judgment,  were  condemned  :  and  if  he 
had  a  warrant  from  God  to  say,  that  he  should  destroy  all  the 
papists,  as  Jonas  had  concerning  the  Ninevites  ;  yet  he  remem 
bers  that  every  repentance,  if  it  be  sincere,  will  do  more,  and 
prevail  greater,  and  last  longer  than  God's  anger  will.  Besides 
these  things,  there  is  a  strange  spring,  and  secret  principle  in 
every  man's  understanding,  that  it  is  oftentimes  turned  about  by 
such  impulses,  of  which  no  man  can  give  an  account.  But  we 
all  remember  a  most  wonderful  instance  of  it  in  the  disputation 
between  the  two  Reynoldses,  John  and  William ;  the  former  of 
*  Heb.  ii.  15. 


260  THE    FRIEND. 

which  being  a  papist,  and  the  latter  a  protestant,  met  and  dis 
puted,  with  a  purpose  to  confute  and  to  convert  each  other. 
And  so  they  did  :  for  those  arguments  which  were  used,  pre 
vailed  fully  against  their  adversary,  and  yet  did  not  prevail  with 
themselves.  The  papist  turned  protestant,  and  the  protestant 
became  a  papist,  and  so  remained  to  their  dying  day.  Of  which 
some  ingenious  person  gave  a  most  handsome  account  in  the  fol 
lowing  excellent  epigram  : 

Bella  inter  geminos  plusquam  civilia  fratres 

Traxerat  ambiguus  religionis  apex, 
llle  reformats  fidei  pro  partibus  instat ; 

Jstc  reformandam  denegat  cssc  fidem. 
JPropositis  causfs  rationibus,  alter  utrinque 

Concurrere  pares,  et  cecidere  pares. 
Quodfuit  in  votis,  fratrem  capit  alter  liter que  ; 

Quodfuit  infatis,  perdit  utcr que  fidem. 
Captivi  gemini  sine  captivante  fuerunt, 

Et  victor  victi  transfuga  castra  petit. 
Quod  genus  hoc  pugncc  est,  ubi  victus  gaudet  uterque, 

Et  tamen  alteruter  se  superasse  dolet? 

But  further  yet,  he  considers  the  natural  and  regular  infirmi 
ties  of  mankind  ;  and  God  considers  them  much  more  ;  he  knows 
that  in  man  tMfere  is  nothing  admirable  but  his  ignorance  and 
weakness ;  his  prejudice,  and  the  infallible  certainty  of  being  de 
ceived  in  many  things  :  he  sees  that  wicked  men  oftentimes 
know  much  more  than  many  very  good  men  ;  and  that  the  un 
derstanding  is  not  of  itself  considerable  in  morality,  and  effects 
nothing  in  rewards  and  punishments  ;  it  is  the  will  only  that 
rules  man  and  can  obey  God.  He  sees  and  deplores  it,  that 
many  men  study  hard  and  understand  little  ;  that  they  dispute 
earnestly  and  understand  not  one  another  at  all ;  that  affections 
creep  so  certainly,  and  mingle  with  their  arguing,  that  the  argu 
ment  is  lost,  and  nothing  remains  but  the  conflict  of  two  adver 
saries'  affections ;  that  a  man  is  so  willing,  so  easy,  so  ready  to 
believe  what  makes  for  his  opinion,  so  hard  to  understand  an  ar 
gument  against  himself,  that  it  is  plain  it  is  the  principle  within, 
not  the  argument  without,  that  determines  him.  He  observes 
also  that  all  the  world  (a  few  individuals  excepted)  are  unaltera 
bly  determined  to  the  religion  of  their  country,  of  their  family,  of 
their  society  ;  that  there  is  never  any  considerable  change  rrrade, 
but  what  is  made  by  war  and  empire,  by  fear  and  hope.  He  re- 


ESSAY    XII.  261 

members  that  it  is  a  rare  thing  to  see  a  Jesuit  of  the  Dominican 
opinion,  or  a  Dominican  (until  of  late)  of  the  Jesuit ;  but  every 
order  gives  laws  to  the  understanding  of  their  novices,  and  they 
never  change.  He  considers  there  is  such  ambiguity  in  words, 
by  which  all  lawgivers  express  their  meaning  ;  that  there  is  such 
abstruseness  in  mysteries  of  religion,  that  some  things  are  so  much 
too  high  for  us,  that  we  can  not  understand  them  rightly ;  and 
yet  they  are  so  sacred,  and  concerning,  that  men  will  think  they 
are  bound  to  look  into  them,  as  far  as  they  can ;  that  it  is  no 
wonder  if  they  quickly  go  too  far,  where  no  understanding,  if  it 
were  fitted  for  it,  could  go  far  enough  ;  but  in  these  things  it  will 
be  hard  not  to  be  deceived,  since  our  words  can  not  rightly  ex 
press  those  things  ;  that  there  is  such  variety  of  human  under 
standings,  that  men's  faces  differ  not  so  much  as  their  souls  ;  and 
that  if  there  were  not  so  much  difficulty  in  things,  yet  they  could 
not  but  be  variously  apprehended  by  several  men.  And  hereto 
he  considers,  that  in  twenty  opinions,  it  may  be  that  not  one  of 
them  is  true  ;  nay,  whereas  Varro  reckoned  that  among  the  old 
philosophers  there  were  eight  hundred  opinions  concerning  the 
summum  bo?ium,  that  yet  not  one  of  them  hit  the  right.  He 
sees  also  that  in  all  religions,  in  all  societies,  in  all  families',  and 
in  all  things,  opinions  differ ;  and  since  opinions  are  too  often  be 
got  by  passion,  by  passions  and  violence  they  are  kept ;  and  every 
man  is  too  apt  to  overvalue  his  own  opinion  ;  and  out  of  a  desire 
that  every  man  should  conform  his  judgment  to  his  that  teaches, 
men  are  apt  to  be  earnest  in  their  persuasion,  and  overact  the 
proposition  ;  and  from  being  true  as  he  supposes,  he  will  think  it 
profitable  ;  and  if  you  warm  him  either  with  confidence  or  oppo 
sition,  he  quickly  tells  you  it  is  necessary ;  and  as  he  loves-  those 
that  think  as  he  does,  so  he  is  ready  to  hate  them  that  do  not  ; 
and  then  secretly  from  wishing  evil  to  him,  he  is  apt  to  believe 
evil  will  come  to  him  ;  and  that  it  is  just  it  should  ;  and  by  this 
time  the  opinion  is  troublesome,  and  puts  other  men  upon  their 
guard  against  it ;  and  then  while  passion  reigns,  and  reason  is 
modest  and  patient,  and  talks  not  loud  like  a  storm,  victory  is 
more  regarded  than  truth,  and  men  call  God  into  the  party,  and 
his  judgments  are  used  for  arguments,  and  the  threatenings  of  the 
Scripture  are  snatched  up  in  haste,  and  men  throw  arrows,  fire 
brands,  and  death,  and  by  this  time  all  the  world  is  in  an  uproar. 
All  this,  and  a  thousand  things  more  the  English  protestants  con- 


262  THE    FRIEND. 

sidering  deny  not  their  communion  to  any  Christian  who  desires 
it,  and  believes  the  apostles'  creed,  and  is  of  the  religion  of  the 
first  four  general  councils  ;  they  hope  well  of  all  that  live  well  ; 
they  receive  into  their  bosom  all  true  believers  of  what  church 
soever ;  arid  for  them  that  err,  they  instruct  them,  and  then  leave 
them  to  their  liberty,  to  stand  or  fall  before  their  own  master."* 

2.  A  doctrine  not  the  less  safe  for  being  the  more  charitable. 

"  Christ  our  Lord  hath  given  us,  amongst  others,  two  infallible 
notes  to  know  the  church.  My  sheep,  saith  he,  hear  my  voice  :f 
and  again,  By  this  shall  all  men  know  that  ye  are  my  disciple?,, 
if  ye  have  love  one  to  another. $ — What  !  shall  we  stand  upon 
conjectural  arguments  from  that  which  men  say  ?  We  are  par 
tial  to  ourselves,  malignant  to  our  opposites.  Let  Christ  be  heard 
who  be  his,  who  not.  And  for  the  hearing  of  his  voice — 0  that 
it  might  be  the  issue  !  Bat  I  see  you  decline  it,  therefore  I  leave 
it  also  for  the  present.  That  other  is  that  which  now  I  stand 
upon, — '  the  badge  of  Christ's  sheep.'  Not  a  likelihood,  but  a 
certain  token  whereby  every  man  may  know  them  :  by  this, 
saith  he,  shall  all  men  know  that  ye  are  my  disciples  if  ye  have 
charity  one  towards  another. — Thanks  be  to  God,  this  mark  of 
our  Saviour  is  in  us,  which  you  with  our  schismatics  and  other 
enemies  want.  As  Solomon  found  the  true  mother  by  her  natu 
ral  affection,  that  chose  rather  to  yield  to  her  adversary's  plea, 
claiming  her  child,  than  endure  that  it  should  be  cut  in  pieces  ; 
so  may  it  soon  be  found  at  this  day  whether  is  the  true  mother. 
Ours,  that  faith,  give  her  the  living  child  and  kill  him  not ;  or 
yours,  that  if  she  may  not  have  it,  is  content  it  be  killed  rather  than 
want  of  her  will.  '  Alas  !'  (saith  ours  even  of  those  that  leave 
her)  '  these  be  my  children  !  I  have  borne  them  to  Christ  in 
baptism  :  I  have  nourished  them  as  I  could  with  mine  own 
breasts,  his  testaments.  I  would  have  brought  them  up  to  man's 
estate,  as  their  free  birth  and  parentage  deserves.  Whether  it 
be  their  lightness  or  discontent,  or  her  enticing  words  and  gay 
shows,  they  leave  me  :  they  have  found  a  better  mother.  Let 
them  live  yet,  though  in  bondage.  I  shall  have  patience  ;  I  per 
mit  the  care  of  them  to  their  father  ;  I  beseech  him  to  keep 
them  that  they  do  no  evil.  If  they  make  their  peace  with  him, 

*  Dissuasive  from  Popery.     Part  II. — B.  i.  s.  7. — Ed. 

f  John  x.  M.—Ed.  J  76.  xiii.  35.— Ed. 


ESSAY    XIII.  263 

I  am  satisfied  :  they  have  not  hurt  me  at  all.'  '  Nay/  but  saith 
yours,  '  I  sit  alone  as  queen  and  mistress  of  Christ's  family,  he 
that  hath  not  me  for  his  mother,  can  not  have  God  for  his  fa 
ther.  Mine,  therefore,  are  these,  either  born  or  adopted  ;  arid 
if  they  will  not  be  mine,  they  shall  be  none.  So  without  expect 
ing  Christ's  sentence  she  cuts  with  the  temporal  sword,  hangs, 
burns,  drawt,  those  that  she  perceives  inclined  to  leave  her,  or 
have  left  her  already.  So  she  kills  with  the  spiritual  sword  those 
that  are  subject  not  to  her,  yea,  thousands  of  souls  that  not  only 
have  no  means  so  to  do.  but  many  which  never  so  much  as  have 
heard  whether  there  be  a  pope  of  Rome  or  no.  Let  our  Sol 
omon  be  judge  between"  them,  yea,  judge  you,  Mr.  Waddesworth  ! 
more  seriously  and  maturely,  not  by  guesses,  but  by  the  very  mark 
of  Christ,  which  wanting  yourselves,  you  have  unawares  discov 
ered  in  us  :  judge,  I  say,  without  passion  and  partiality,  accord 
ing  to  Christ's  word,  which  is  his  flock,  which  is  his  church."* 


ESSAY   XIII. 


ON  THE  LAW   OF  NATIONS. 

EvdaLfioviav  teal  diKaioavvrjv  iruvra  Idi&rov  e/UTrpoadev  rera/c- 
rai  <j)vcef  TOVTCJV  d£  r<l  fj.ev  dvdpuiriva  e/f  TO.  Oela,  ra  6t  dela  elf  TOV  i]je/j.6va 
vovv  %v(j.iravTa  del  /3%£7retv,  ovx  wf  ^rpof  dperi^  rl  /nopiov,  uhTia  npbg  dptTrjv 
iv  dperai£  del  vTrofievovaav,  cjf  rrpbg  v6fj.ov  riva  vo/uoOerovvra.  PLATO. 

For  all  things  that  regard  the  well-being  and  justice  of  a  state  are  pre-or 
dained  and  established  in  the  nature  of  the  individual.  Of  these  it  behooves 
that  the  merely  human  (the  temporal  and  fluxional)  should  be  referred  and 
subordinated  to  the  divine  in  man,  and  the  divine  in  like  manner  to  the 
Supreme  Mind,  so  however  that  the  state  is  not  to  regulate  its  actions  by 
reference  to  any  particular  form  and  fragments  of  virtue,  but  must  fix  its 
eye  on  that  virtue,  which  is  the  abiding  spirit  and  (as  it  were)  substratum 
in  all  the  virtues,  as  on  a  law  that  is  itself  legislative. 

IT  were  absurd  to  suppose,  that  individuals  should  be  under  a 
law  of  moral  obligation,  and  yet  that  a  million  of  the  same  in- 

*  Letter  to  a  friend  who  had  deserted  the  Church  of  England  for  that  of 
Rome. — Ed. 


264  THE    FRIEND. 

dividuals  acting  collectively  or  through  representatives,  should 
be  exempt  from  all  law  :  for  morality  is  no  accident  of  human 
nature,  but  its  essential  characteristic.  A  being  altogether  with 
out  morality  is  either  a  beast  or  a  fiend,  accordingly  as  we  con 
ceive  this  want  of  conscience  to  be  natural  or  self-produced  ;  a 
mere  negation  of  goodness,  or  the  consequence  of  rebellion  to  it. 
Yet  were  it  possible  to  conceive  a  man  wholly  immoral,  it  would 
remain  impossible  to  conceive  him  without  a  moral  obligation  to 
be  otherwise  ;  and  none,  but  a  madman,  will  imagine  that  the 
essential  qualities  of  any  thing  can  be  altered  by  its  becoming  part 
of  an  aggregate  ;  that  a  grain  of  corn,  for  instance,  shall  cease 
to  contain  flour,  as  soon  as  it  is  part  of  a  peck  or  bushel.  It  is, 
therefore,  grounded  in  the  nature  of  the  thing,  and  not  by  a  mere 
fiction  of  the  mind,  that  wise  men,  who  have  written  on  the  law 
of  nations,  contemplate  the  several  states  of  the  civilized  world, 
as  so  many  individuals,  and  equally  with  the  latter  under  a 
moral  obligation  to  exercise  their  free  agency  within  such  bounds, 
as  render  it  compatible  with  the  existence  of  free  agency  in  others. 
We  may  represent  to  ourselves  this  original  free  agency,  as  a  right 
of  common,  the  formation  of  separate  states  as  an  inclosure  of 
this  common,  the  allotments  awarded  severally  to  the  co-pro 
prietors  as  constituting  national  rights,  and  the  law  of  nations  as 
the  common  register-office  of  their  title-deeds.  ,  But  in  all  mo 
rality,  though  the  principle,  which  is  the  abiding  spirit  of  the 
law,  remains  perpetual  and  unaltered,  even  as  that  Supreme 
Reason  in  whom  and  from  whom  it  has  its  being,  yet  the  letter 
of  the  law,  that  is,  the  application  of  it  to  particular  instances, 
and  the  mode  of  realizing  it  in  actual  practice,  must  be  modified 
by  the  existing  circumstances.  What  we  should  desire  to  do, 
the  conscience  alone  will  inform  us  ;  but  how  and  when  we  are 
to  make  the  attempt,  and  to  what*  extent  it  is  in  our  power  to 
accomplish  it,  are  questions  for  the  judgment,  and  require  an  ac 
quaintance  with  facts,  and  their  bearings  on  each  other.  Thence 
the  improvement  of  our  judgment,  and  the  increase  of  our  knowl 
edge,  on  all  subjects  included  within  our  sphere  of  action,  are 
not  merely  advantages  recommended  by  prudence,  but  absolute 
duties  imposed  on  us  by  conscience. 

As  the  circumstances,  then,  under4  which  men  act  as  states 
men,  are  different  from  those  under  which  they  act  as  individuals, 
a  proportionate  difference  must  be  expected  in  the  practical  rules 


ESSAY   XIII.  265 

by  which  their  public  conduct  is  to  be  determined.  Let  me  not 
be  misunderstood  :  I  speak  of  a  difference  in  the  practical  rules, 
not  in  the  moral  law  itself,  the  means  of  administering  in  par 
ticular  cases,  and  under  given  circumstances,  which  it  is  the  sole 
object  of  these  rules  to  point  out.  The  spirit  continues  one  and 
the  same,  though  it  may  vary  its  form  according  to  the  element 
into  which  it  is  transported.  This  difference,  with  its  grounds 
and  consequences,  it  is  the  province  of  the  philosophical  publicist 
to  discover  and  display  :  arid  exactly  in  this  point  (I  speak  with 
unfeigned  diffidence)  it  appears  to  me  that  the  writers  on  the  law 
of  nations,*  whose  works  I  have  had  the  opportunity  of  studying, 
have  been  least  successful. 

In  what  does  the  law  of  nations  differ  from  the  laws  enacted 
by  a  particular  state  for  its  own  subjects  ?  The  solution  is  evi 
dent.  The  law  of  nations,  considered  apart  from  the  common 
principle  of  all  morality,  is  not  fixed  or  positive  in  itself,  nor  sup* 
plied  with  any  regular  means  of  being  enforced.  Like  those  du 
ties  in  private  life  which,  for  the  same  reasons,  moralists  have 
entitled  imperfect  duties  (though  the  most  atrocious  guilt  may  be 
involved  in  the  omission  or  violation  of  them),  the  law  of  nations 
appeals  only  to  the  conscience  and  prudence  of  the  parties  con 
cerned.  Wherein  then  does  it  differ  from  the  moral  laws  which 
the  reason,  considered  as  conscience,  dictates  for  the  conduct  of 
individuals  ?  This  is  a  more  difficult  question  ;  but  my  answer 
would  be  determined  by,  and  grounded  on,  the  obvious  differ 
ences  of  the  circumstances  in  the  two  cases.  Remember  then, 
that  we  are  now  reasoning,  not  as  sophists  or  system-mongers, 
but  as  men  anxious  to  discover  what  is  right  in  order  that  we 
may  practise  it,  or  at  least  give  our  suffrage  and  the  influence  of 
our  opinion  in  recommending  its  practice.  We  must  therefore 
confine  the  question  to  those  cases,  in  which  honest  men  and  real 

*  Grotius,  Bynkerschoek,  Puftendorf,  Wolfe,  and  Vattel ;  to  whose  works 
I  must  add,  as  comprising  whatever  is  most  valuable  in  the  preceding  au 
thors,  with  many  important  improvements  and  additions,  Robinson's  Re 
ports  of  Cases  in  the  Admiralty  Court,  under  Sir  W.  Scott :  to  whom  in 
ternational  law  is  under  no  less  obligation  than  the  law  of  commercial  pro 
ceeding  was  to  the  late  Lord  Mansfield.  As  I  have  never  seen  Sir  W.  Scott, 
nor  either  by  myself  or  my  connections  enjoy  the  honor  of  the  remotest 
acquaintance  with  him,  I  trust  that  even  by  those  who  may  think  my  opin 
ion  erroneous,  I  shall  not  at  least  be  suspected  of  intentional  flattery. 
1817. 

VOL.    II.  M 


266  THE   FEIEND. 

patriots  can  suppose  any  controversy  to  exist  between  real  patriot 
ism  and  common  honesty.  The  objects  of  the  patriot  arc,  that 
his  countrymen  should,  as  far  as  circumstances  permit,  enjoy 
what  the  Creator  designed  for  the  enjoyment  of  animals  endowed 
with  reason,  and  of  course  that  they  should  have  it  in  their 
power  to  develop  those  faculties  which  were  given  them  to  be 
developed.  He  would  do  his  best  that  every  one  of  his  country 
men  should  possess  whatever  all  men  may  and  should  possess, 
and  that  a  sufficient  number  should  be  enabled  and  encouraged 
to  acquire  those  excellencies  which,  though  not  necessary  or  pos 
sible  for  all  men,  are  yet  to  all  men  useful  and  honorable.  He 
knows  that  patriotism  itself  is  a  necessary  link  in  the  golden 
chain  of  our  affections  and  virtues,  and  turns  away  with  indignant 
scorn  from  the  false  philosophy  or  mistaken  religion,  which  would 
persuade  him  that  cosmopolitism  is  nobler  than  nationality,  the 
human  race  a  sublimer  object  of  love  than  a  people ;  and  that 
Plato,  Luther,  Newton,  arid  their  equals,  formed  themselves 
neither  in  the  market  nor  the  senate,  but  in  the  world,  and  for 
all  men  of  all  ages.  True !  But  where,  and  among  whom  are 
these  giant  exceptions  produced  ?  In  the  wide  empires  of  Asia, 
where  millions  of  human  beings  acknowledge  no  other  bond  but 
that  of  a  common  slavery,  and  are  distinguished  on  the  map  but 
by  a  name  which  themselves  perhaps  never  heard,  or  hearing 
abhor  ?  No  !  in  a  circle  defined  by  human  affections,  the  first 
firm  sod  within  which  becomes  sacred  beneath  the  quickened  step 
of  the  returning  citizen ; — here,  where  the  powers  and  interests 
of  men  spread  without  confusion  through  a  common  sphere,  like 
the  vibrations  propagated  in  the  air  by  a  single  voice,  distinct 
yet  coherent,  and  all  uniting  to  express  one  thought  and  the  same 
feeling  ; — here,  where  even  the  common  soldier  dares  force  a  pass 
age  for  his  comrades  by  gathering  up  the  bayonets  of  the  enemy 
into  his  own  breast,  because  his  country  expected  every  man  to 
do  his  duty,  and  this  not  after  he  has  been  hardened  by  habit, 
but,  as  probably  in  his  first  battle  ;  not  reckless  or  hopeless,  but 
braving  death  from  a  keener  sensibility  to  those  blessings  which 
make  life  dear,  to  those  qualities  which  render  himself  worthy  to 
enjoy  them ; — here,  where  the  royal  crown  is  loved  and  wor 
shiped  as  a  glory  around  the  sainted  head  of  freedom  ; — where 
the  rustic  at  his  plough  whistles  with  equal  enthusiasm,  "  God 
save  the  King,"  and  "  Britons  never  shall  be  slaves,"  or,  perhaps 


ESSAY    XIII.  267 

leaves  one  thistle  unweeded  in  his  garden,  because  it  is  the  sym 
bol  of  his  dear  native  land  ;* — here,  from  within  this  circle  de 
fined,  as  light  by  shade,  or  rather  as  lighf  within  light,  by  its  in 
tensity, — here  alone,  and  only  within  these  magic  circles,  rise  up 
the  awful  spirits,  whose  words  are  oracles  for  mankind,  whose 
love  embraces  all  countries,  and  whose  voice  sounds  through  all 
ages  !  Here,  and  here  only,  may  we  confidently  expect  those 
mighty  minds  to  be  reared  and  ripened,  whose  names  are  natu 
ralized  in  foreign  lands,  the  sure  fellow-travellers  of  civilization, 
and  yet  render  their  own  country  dearer  and  more  proudly  dear 
to  their  own  countrymen.  This  is  indeed  cosmopolitism,  at  once 
the  nurseling  and  the  nurse  of  patriotic  affection.  This,  and  this 
alone,  is  genuine  philanthropy,  which  like  the  olive-tree,  sacred 
to  concord  and  to  wisdom,  fattens  not  exhausts  the  soil,  from 
which  it  sprang,  and  in  which  it  remains  rooted.  It  is  feeble 
ness  only  which  can  not  be  generous  without  injustice,  or  just 
without  ceasing  to  be  generous.  Is  the  morning  star  less  brilliant, 
or  does  a  ray  less  fall  011  the  golden  fruitage  of  the  earth",  be 
cause  the  moons  of  Saturn  too  feed  their  lamps  from  the  same 
sun  ?  Even  Germany, — though  curst  with  a  base  and  hateful 
brood  of  nobles  and  princelings,  cowardly  and  ravenous  jackals  to 
the  very  flocks  intrusted  to  them  as  to  shepherds,  who  hunt  for 
the  tiger  and  whine  and  wag  their  tails  for  his  bloody  offal — even 
Germany,  the  ever-changing  boundaries  of  which  superannuate 
the  last  year's  map,  and  are  altered  as  easily  as  the  hurdles  of  a 
temporary  sheep-fold,  is  still  remembered  with  filial  love  and  a 
patriot's  pride,  when  the  thoughtful  German  hears  the  names  of 
Luther  and  Leibnitz.  Ah  !  why,  he  sighs,  why  for  herself  in 
vain  should  my  country  have  produced  such  a  host  of  immortal 

*  I  can  not  here  refuse  myself  the  pleasure  of  recording  a  speech  of  the 
poet  Burns,  related  to  me  by  the  lady  to  whom  it  was  addressed.  Having 
been  asked  by  her,  why  in  his  more  serious  poems  lie  had  not  changed  the 
two  or  three  Scotch  words  which  seemed  only  to  disturb  the  purity  of  the 
style, — the  poet  with  great  sweetness,  and  his  usual  happiness  in  reply,  an 
swered  that  in  truth  it  would  have  been  better,  but — 

The  rough  bur-thistle  spreading  wide 

Amang  the  bearded  bear, 
I  turn'd  the  weeder-clips  aside 
An'  spar'd  the  symbol  dear. 

An  author  may  be  allowed  to  quote  from  his  own  poems,  when  he  does  it 
with  as  much  modesty  and  felicity  as  Burns  did  in  this  instance. 


268  THE   FRIEND. 

minds !  Yea,  even  the  poor  enslaved,  degraded,  and  barbarized 
Greek  can  still  point  to, the  harbor  of  Tenedos,  and  say, — "There 
lay  our  fleet  when  we  were  besieging  Troy." 

Reflect  a  moment  on  the  past  history  of  this  wonderful  people. 
What  were  they  while  they  remained  free  and  independent, — 
when  Greece  resembled  a  collection  of  mirrors  set  in  a  single 
frame,  each  having  its  own  focus  of  patriotism,  yet  all  capable, 
as  at  Marathon  arid  Plalea,  of  converging  to  one  point  and  of 
consuming  a  common  foe  ?  What  were  they  then  ?  The  fountains 
of  light  and  civilization,  of  truth  and  of  beauty,  to  all  mankind ! 
they  were  the  thinking  head,  the  beating  heart,  of  the  whole 
world !  They  lost  their  independence,  and  with  their  independ 
ence  their  patriotism  ;  and  became  the  cosmopolites  of  antiquity. 
It  has  been  truly  observed  by  the  author  of  the  work  for  which 
Palm  was  murdered,  that,  after  the  first  acts  of  severity,  the  Ro 
mans  treated  the  Greeks  not  only  more  mildly  than  their  other 
slaves  and  dependents,  but  behaved  to  them  even  affectionately 
and  with  munificence.  The  victor  nation  felt  reverentially  the 
presence  of  the  visible  and  invisible  deities  that  gave  sanctity  to 
every  grove,  every  fountain,  and  every  forum.  "  Think,"  (writes 
Pliny  to  one  of  his  friends)  "  that  you  are  sent  into  the  province  of 
Achaia,  that  true  and  genuine  Greece,  where  civilization,  letters, 
even  corn,  are  believed  to  have  been  discovered ;  that  you  are 
sent  to  administer  the  affairs  of  free  states,  that  is,  to  men  emi 
nently  free,  who  have  retained  their  natural  right  by  valor,  by 
services,  by  friendship,  lastly  by  treaty  and  by  religion.  Revere 
the  gods  their  founders,  the  sacred  influences  represented  in  those 
gods ;  revere  their  ancient  glory  and  this  very  old  ageNwhich  in 
man  is  venerable,  in  cities  sacred.  Cherish  in  thyself  a  rever 
ence  of  antiquity,  a  reverence  for  their  great  exploits,  a  reverence 
even  for  their  fables.  Detract  nothing  from  the  liberty,  or  the 
dignity,  or  even  the  pretensions  of  any  state  ;  keep  before  thine 
eyes  that  this  is  the  land  which  sent  us  our  institutions,  which 
gave  us  our  laws,  not  after  it  was  subjugated,  but  in  compliance 
with  our  petition."*  And  what  came  out  of  these  men,  who 
were  eminently  free  without  patriotism,  because  without  national 
independence  ?  (which  eminent  freedom,  however,  Pliny  him 
self,  in  the  very  next  sentence,  styles  the  shadow  and  residuum 

*  Lib.  VIII.  Ep.  24.— Ed. 


ESSAY    XIII.  269 

of  liberty.)*  While  they  were  intense  patriots,  they  were  the 
benefactors  of  all  mankind,  legislators  for  the  very  nation  that 
afterwards  subdued  and  enslaved  them.  When,  therefore,  they 
became  pure  cosmopolites,  and  no  partial  affections  interrupted 
their  philanthropy,  and  when  yet  they  retained  their  country, 
their  language,  and  their  arts,  what  noble  works,  what  mighty 
discoveries  may  we  not  expect  from  them  ?  If  the  applause  of 
a  little  city,  the  first-rate  town  of  a  country  not  much  larger  than 
Yorkshire,  and  the  encouragement  of  a  .Pericles,  produced  a 
Phidias,  a  Sophocles,  and  a  constellation  of  other  stars  scarcely 
inferior  in  glory,  what  will  not  the  applause  of  the  world  effect, 
and  the  boundless  munificence  of  the  world's  imperial  masters  ? 
Alas  !  no  Sophocles  appeared,  no  Phidias  was  born ;  individual 
genius  fled  with  national  independence,  and  the  best  products 
were  cold  and  laborious  copies  of  what  their  fathers  had  thought 
and  invented  in  grandeur  and  majesty.  At  length  nothing  re 
mained,  but  dastardly  and  cunning  slaves,  who  avenged  their 
own  ruin  and  degradation  by  assisting  to  degrade  and  ruin  their 
conquerorg  ;  and  the  golden  harp  of  their  divine  language  re 
mained  only  as  the  frame  on  which  priests  and  monks  spun  their 
dirty  cobwebs  of  sophistry  and  superstition  ! 

If  then  in  order  to  be  men  we  must  be  patriots,  and  patriotism 
can  not  exist  without  national  independence,  we  need  no  new  or 
particular  code  of  morals  to  justify  us  in  placing  and  preserving 
our  country  in  that  relative  situation  which  is  most  favorable  to 
its  independence.  But  the  true  patriot  is  aware  that  this  object 
is  not  to  be  accomplished  by  a  system  of  general  conquest,  such 
as  was  pursued  by  Philip  of  Macedon  and  his  son,  nor  yet  by  the 
political  annihilation  of  the  one  state,  which  happens  to  be  its 
most  formidable  rival ; — the  unwise  measure  recommended  by 
Cato,  and  carried  into  effect  by  the  Romans  in  the  instance  of 
Carthage.  Not  by  the  latter  ; — for  rivalry  between  two  nations 
conduces  to  the  independence  of  both,  calls  forth  or  fosters  all  the 
virtues  by  which  national  security  is  maintained ; — arid  still  less 
by  the  former  ;  for  the  victor  nation  itself  must  at  length,  by  the 
very  extension  of  its  own  conquests,  sink  into  a  mere  province  ; 
nay,  it  will  most  probably  become  the  most  abject  portion  of  the 
empire,  and  the  most  cruelly  oppressed,  both  because  it  will  be 

*  Quibus  reliquam  umbram  ft  residuum  libertatis  nomen  cripere,  durum, 
ferum,  barbarumquc  est. — 76. — Ed. 


270  THE    FRIEND. 

more  feared  and  suspected  by  the  common  tyrant,  and  because  it 
will  be  the  sink  and  centre  of  his  luxury  and  corruption.  Even 
in  cases  of  actual  injury  and  just  alarm  the  patriot  sets  bounds  to 
th%  reprisal  of  national  vengeance,  and  contents  himself  with 
such  securities  as  are  compatible  with  the  welfare,  though  not 
with  the  ambitious  projects  of  the  nation,  the  aggressions  of 
which  had  given  the  provocation  :  for  as  patriotism  inspires  no 
superhuman  faculties,  neither  can  it  dictate  any  conduct  which 
would  require  such"  He  is  too  conscious  of  his  own  ignorance  of 
the  future,  to  dare  extend  his  calculations  into  remote  periods  ; 
nor,  because  he  is  a  statesman,  arrogates  to  himself  the  cares  of 
Providence  and  the  government  of  the  world.  How  does  lie 
know,  but  that  the  very  independence  and  consequent  virtues  of 
the  nation,  which  in  the  anger  of  cowardice  he  would  fain  reduce 
to  absolute  insignificance,  and  rob  even  of  its  ancient  name,  may 
in  some  future  emergence  be  the  destined  guardians  of  his  own 
country ;  and  that  the  power  which  now  alarms,  may  hereafter 
protect  and  preserve  it  ?  The  experience  of  history  authorizes  to 
believe  not  only  in  the  possibility,  but  even  the  probability,  of 
such  an  event.  An  American  commander,*  who  has  deserved 
and  received  the  highest  honors  which  his  grateful  country, 
through  her  assembled  representatives,  could  bestow  upon  him, 
once  said  to  me  with  a  sigh  :  In  an  evil  hour  for  my  country  did 
the  French  and  Spaniards  abandon  Louisiana  to  the  United 
States.  We  were  not  sufficiently  a  country  before  :  and  should 
we  ever  be  rnad  enough  to  drive  the  English  from  Canada  and 
her  other  North  American  provinces,  wre  shall  soon  cease  to  be  a 
country  at  all.  Without  local  attachment,  without  national 
honor,  we  shall  resemble  a  swarm  of  insects  that  settle  on  the 
fruits  of  the  earth  to  corrupt  and  consume  them,  rather  than  men 
who  love  and  cleave  to  the  land  of  their  forefathers.  After  a 
shapeless  anarchy  and  a  series  of  civil  wars,  we  shall  at  last  be 
formed  into  many  countries;  unless  the  vices  engendered  in  the 
process  should  demand  further  punishment,  and  we  should  pre 
viously  fall  beneath  the  despotism  of  some  military  adventurer, 
like  a  lion  consumed  by  an  inward  disease,  prostrate  and  helpless 
beneath  the  beak  and  talons  of  a  vulture,  or  yet  meaner  bird 
of  prey.f 

*  Decatur. — Ed, 

f  See  Table  Talk,  VI.  p.  398.—^. 


ESSAY    XIV. 


"O,  %  [j.tv  ~pbg  rov  is  o^ov  TT^OVTOV,  juu/.9iov  (5£  Trpof  rl  tyuvraajua 
«77acr?/(,-,  6  iravrax'/  KOI  ovfiap]  i~i,  (pspei  fj.ddrj[J.a  Kal  eTrfnydev^ 
ILOV  KC^  ootyov  rl  8o%aadi'jG£Tai'  ruv  6t-  u/lAwv  K.araye'Xa  6  TroAm/tdf.  Tavrfjv 
rr/v  ahiav  xpn  <j>dvat  rov  fir/re  a/.Ao  Kahdv,  p'jre  ru  Trpdf  rov  irohepov  fj-eyako- 
7^pt-~u^  dcKetv  rag  Tr6hei£,  TUV  TToAtrcjv  //uA'  iviore  OVK  dtyvtiv  ovruv  6vc- 
e  JUT/V.  Hug  Aeyetf  ;  Ilwf  fiev  ovv  avTOV£  ov  "hiyoi/j,'  uv  irapdrrav 
.'f  ye  uvdyKi]  8i&  (3iov  ireivtiai  ri)v  Tpv%r/v  del  TJJV  avrcJv  tiiegeWecv. 

PLATO* 

Whatever  study  or  doctrine  bears  upon  the  -wealth  of  the  whole,  say 
rather  on  a  certain  phantom  of  a  state  in  the  whole,  which  is  everywhere 
and  nowhere,  this  shall  be  deemed  most  useful  and  wise;  and  all  else  is  the 
Btate-craftsrnan's  scorn.  This  we  dare  pronounce  the  cause  why  nations 
torpid  on  their  dignity  in  general,  conduct  their  wars  so  little  in  a  grand 
and  magnanimous  spirit,  while  the  citizens  are  too  often  wretched,  though 
endowed  with  high  capabilities  by  nature.  How  say  you?  Nay,  how 
should  I  not  call  them  wretched,  who  are  under  the  unrelenting  necessity  of 
wasting  away  their  life  in  the  mere  search  after  the  means  of  supporting  it  ? 

IN  the  preceding  essay  I  treated  of  what  may  be  wisely  desired 
in  respect  to  our  foreign  relations.  The  same  sanity  of  mind  will 
the  true  patriot  display  in  all  that  regards  the  internal  prosperity 
of  his  country.  He  will  reverence  not  only  whatever  tends  to 
make  the  component  individuals  more  happy,  and  more  worthy 
of  happiness ;  but  likewise  whatever  tends  to  bind  them  more 
closely  together  as  a  people ; — that  as  a  multitude  of  parts  and 
functions  make  up  one  human  body,  so  the  whole  multitude  of - 
his  countrymen  may,  by  the  visible  and  invisible  influences  of  re 
ligion,  language,  laws,  customs,  and  the  reciprocal  dependence 
and  re-action  of  trade  and  agriculture,  be  organ^ed  into  one  body 
politic.  But  much  as  he  desires  to  see  all  become  a  whole,  he 

*  DC  Lcffibus,  viii. — The  Greek  is  chiefly  taken  from  the  beginning  of  this 
book  of  the  Laws;  but  it  is  not  taken  consecutively;  some  of  the  expres 
sions  are  from  other  parts  of  Plato,  and  some  seem  to  be  the  Author's 
own. — Ed. 


272  THE    FKIEND. 

places  limits  even  to  this  wish,  and  abhors  that  system  of  policy 
which  would  blend  men  into  a  state  by  the  dissolution  of  all  those 
virtues  which  make  them  happy  and  estimable  as  individuals. 
Sir  James  Steuart,  after  stating  the  case  of  the  vine-dresser,  who 
is  proprietor  of  a  bit  of  land,  on  which  grain  (enough,  and  no 
more)  is  raised  for  himself  and  family,  and  who  provides  for  their 
other  wants,  of  clothing,  salt,  &c.  by  his  extra  labor  as  a  vine 
dresser,  observes  : — '  From  this  example  we  discover  the  differ 
ence  between  agriculture  exercised  as  a  trade,  and  as  a  direct 
means  of  subsisting.  We  have  the  tAvo  species  in  the  vine 
dresser  :  he  labors  the  vineyard  as  a  trade,  and  his  spot  of  ground 
for  subsistence.  We  may  farther  conclude,  that  as  to  the  last 
part  he  is  only  useful  to  himself ;  but  as  to  the  first,  he  is  useful 
to  the  society  and  becomes  a  member  of  it  ;  consequently  were  it 
not  for  his  trade  the  state  would  lose  nothing,  although  the  vine 
dresser  and  his  land  were  both  swallowed  up  by  an  earthquake.'* 
Now  this  contains  the  sublime  philosophy  of  the  sect  of  econo 
mists.  They  worship  a  kind  of  nonentity  under  the  different 
words,  the  state,  the  whole,  the  society,  and  so  on,  and  to  this 
idol  they  make  bloodier  sacrifices  than  ever  the  Mexicans  did  to 
Tescalipoca.  All,  that  is,  each  and  every  sentient  being  in  a 
given  tract,  are  made  diseased  and  vicious,  in  order  that  each 
may  become  useful  to  all,  or  the  state,  or  the  society, — that  is,  to 
the  word,  all,  the  word  state,  or  the  word  society.  The  absurdity 
may  be  easily  perceived  by  omitting  the  words  relating  to  this 
idol — as  for  instance — in  a  former  paragraph  of  the  same  (in 
most  respects)  excellent  work  :  '  If  it  therefore  happens  that  a» 
additional  number  produced  do  no  more  than  feed  themselves, 
then  I  perceive  no  advantage  gained  from  their  production.'! 
What  !  No  advantage  gained  by,  for  instance,  ten  thousand 
happy,  intelligent,  and  immortal  beings  having  been  produced  ! — 
0  yes  !  but  no  advantage  to  this  society. — What  is  this  society, 
this  whole,  this  state  ?  Is  it  any  thing  else  but  a  word  of  con 
venience  to  express  at  once  the  aggregate  of  confederated  indi 
viduals  living  in  a  certain  district  ?  Let  the  sum  total  of  each 
man's  happiness*be  supposed  —  1000  ;  and  suppose  ten  thousand 
men  produced,  who  neither  made  swords  nor  poison,  nor  found 
corn  n/>r  clothes  for  those  who  did — but  who  procured  by  their 
labor  food  and  raiment  for  themselves,  and  for  their  children  ; — 
*  Polit.  Econ.  vol.  i.  c.  14.— Ed.  f  Ib.— Ed. 


ESSAY    XIV.  273 

would  not  that  society  be  richer  by  10,000,000  parts  of  happi 
ness  ?  And  think  you  it  possible,  that  ten  thousand  happy  hu 
man  beings  can  exist  together  without  increasing  each  other's 
happiness,  or  that  it  will  not  overflow  into  countless  channels,* 
and  diffuse  itself  through  the  rest  of  the  society  ? 

The  poor  vine-dresser  rises  from  sweet  sleep,  worships  his 
Maker,  goes  with  his  wife  and  children  into  his  little  plot — returns 
to  his  hut  at  noon,  and  eats  the  produce  of  the  similar  labor  of  a 
former  day.  Is  he  useful  ?  No,  not  yet.  Suppose  then,  that 
*  during  the  remaining  hours  of  the  day  he  endeavored  to  provide 
for  his  moral  and  intellectual  appetites,  by  physical  experiments 
and  philosophical  research,  by  acquiring  knowledge  for  himself 
and  communicating  it  to  his  wife  and  children.  Would  he  be 
useful  then  ?  He  useful !  '  The  state  would  lose  nothing  although 
the  vine-dresser  and  his  land  were  both  swallowed  up  by  an 
earthquake  !'  Well  then,  instead  of  devoting  the  latter  half  of 
each  day  to  his  closet,  his  laboratory,  or  to  neighborly  conversa 
tion,  suppose  he  goes  to  the  vineyard,  and  from  the  ground  which 
would  maintain  in  health,  virtue,  and  wisdom,  twenty  of  his 
fellow-creatures,  helps  to  raise  a  quantity  of  liquor  that  will  dis 
ease  the  bodies  and  debauch  the  souls  of  a  hundred — Is  he  use 
ful  now  ?  0  yes  !  a  very  useful  man,  and  a  most  excellent 
citizen.f 

In  what  then  does  the  law  between  state  and  state  differ  from 
that  between  man  and  man  ?  For  hitherto  we  seem  to  have 
discovered  no  variation.  The  law  of  nations  is  the  law  of  com 
mon  honesty,  modified  by  the  circumstances  in  which  states  dif 
fer  from  individuals.  According  to  my  best  understanding,  the 
difference  may  be  reduced  to  this  one  point :  that  the  influence 
of  example  in  any  extraordinary  case,  as  the  possible  occasion  of 
an  action  apparently  like,  though  in  reality  very  different,  is  of 

*  Well,  and  in  the  spirit  of  genuine  philosophy,  does  the  poet  describe 
such  beings  as  men 

Who  being  innocent  do  for  that  cause 

Bestir  them  in  good  deeds 

Wordsworth. 

Providence,  by  the  ceaseless  activity  which  it  has  implanted  in  our  nature, 
has  sufficiently  guarded  against  an  innocence  without  virtue. 

•j-  So  in  Jollie's  and  Hutchinson's  History  of  Cumberland,  the  writer 
apeaks  of  a  small  estatesman,  bred  to  a  rural  life,  who  can  not  betake  him 
self  from  an  indolent  habit  to  manufacturing  and  labor  ! — Introd.  p.  39, 1830. 

M* 


274  THE    FEIEND. 

considerable  importance  in  the  moral  calculations  of  an  individ 
ual  ;  but  of  little,  if  any,  in  those  of  a  nation.     The  reasons  are 
evident.     In  the  first  place,  in  cases  concerning  which  there  can 
be  any  dispute  between  an  honest  man  and  a  true  patriot,  the 
circumstances,   which   at    once   authorize   and    discriminate   the 
measure,  are  so  marked  and  peculiar  and  notorious,  that  it  is  in- 
'capable  of  being  drawn  into  a  precedent  by  any  other  state  un 
der  dissimilar  circumstances  ;  except  perhaps  as  a  mere  pretext 
*f>r  an  action,  which  had  been  predetermined  without  reference 
N;  this  authority,  and  which  would  have  taken  place,  though  it 
had  never  existed.      But  if  so  strange  a  thing  should  happen,  as 
a  second   coincidence  of  the  same  circumstances,  or  of  circum 
stances  sufficiently  similar  to   render  the  prior  measure   a  fair 
precedent ;  then,  if  the  one   action  was  justifiable,  so  will  the 
other  be ;  and  without  any  reference  to  the  former,  which  in 
this  case  may  be  useful  as  a  light,  but  can  not  be  requisite  as  an 
authority.     Secondly,  in   extraordinary  cases  it  is  ridiculous  to 
suppose  that  the  conduct  of  states  will  be  determined  by  exam 
ple.     We   know  that  they  neither  will,  nor  in  the   nature   of 
things  can,  be  determined  by  any  other  consideration  but  that  of 
the  imperious  circumstances,  which  render  a  particular  measure 
advisable.     But  lastly,  and  more  important  than  all,  individuals 
are  and  must  be  under  positive -laws  :  and  so  very  great  is  the 
advantage  which  results  from  the  regularity  of  legal  decisions, 
and  their  consequent   capability  of  being  foreknown  and  relied 
upon,  that  equity  itself  must  sometimes  be  sacrificed  to  it.     For 
the  very  letter  of  a  positive  law  is  part  of  its  spirit.     But  states 
neither   are,  nor  can  be,  under  positive  laws.     The  only  fixed 
part  of  the  law  of  nations  is  the   spirit  :  the  letter  of  the  law 
consists  wholly  in  the  circumstances  to  which  the  spirit  of  the 
law  is  applied.     It  is  mere  puerile  declamation  to  rail  against  a 
country,  a?  having  imitated  the  very  measures  for  which  it  had 
most  blamed  its  ambitious  enemy,  if  that  enemy  had  previously 
changed   all  the   relative   circumstances  which  had  existed  for 
him,  and  therefore  rendered  his  conduct  iniquitous  ;  but  which, 
having  been  removed,  however  iniquitously,  can  not  without  ab 
surdity  be  supposed   any  longer  to   control  the  measures  of  an 
Innocent  nation,  necessitated  to  struggle  for  its  own  safety  ;  es 
pecially  when  the  measures  in  question  were  adopted  for  the  very 
purpose  of  restoring  those  circumstances. 


ESSAY  XIV.  275 

There  are  times  when  it  would  be  wise  to  regard  patriotism 
as  a  light  that  is  in  danger  of  being  blown  out,  rather  than  as 
a  fire  which  needs  to  be  fanned  by  the  winds  of  party  spirit. 
There  are  times  when  party  spirit,  without  any  unwonted  excess, 
may  yet  become  faction  ;  and  though  in  general  not  less  useful 
than  natural  in  a  free  government,  may  under  particular  emer 
gencies  prove  fatal  to  freedom  itself.  I  trust  I  arn  writing  to 
those  who  think  with  rne,  that  to  have  blackened  a  ministry, 
however  strong  or  rational  our  dislike  may  be  of  the  persons 
who  compose  it,  is  a  poor  excuse  and  a  miserable  compensation 
for  the  crime  of  unnecessarily  blackening  the  character  of  our 
country.  Under  this  conviction,  I  request  my  reader  to  cast  his 
eye  back  on  rny  last  argument,  and  then  to  favor  me  with  his 
patient  attention  while  I  attempt  at  once  to  explain  its  purport 
and  to  show  its  cogency. 

Let  us  transport  ourselves  in  fancy  to  the  age  and  country  of 
the  patriarchs,  or,  if  the  reader  prefers  it,  to  some  small  colony 
uninfluenced  by  the  mother  country,  which  has  not  organized 
itself  into  a  state,  or  agreed  to  acknowledge  any  one  particular 
governor.  We  will  suppose  this  colony  to  consist  of  from  twenty 
to  thirty  households  or  separate  establishments,  differing  greatly 
from  each  other  in  the  number  of  retainers  and  in  extent  of  pos 
sessions.  Each  household,  however,  possesses  its  own  domain, 
the  least  equally  with  the  greatest,  in  full  right ;  and  its  master 
is  an  independent  sovereign  within  his  own  boundaries.  This 
mutual  understanding  and  tacit  agreement  we  may  well  suppose 
to  have  been  the  gradual  result  of  many  feuds,  which  had  pro 
duced  misery  to  all  and  real  advantage  to  none  ;  and  that  tho 
same  sober  and  reflecting  persons,  dispersed  through  the  different 
establishments,  who  had  brought  about  this  state  of  things,  had 
likewise  coincided  in  the  propriety  of  some  other  prudent  and 
humane  regulations,  which  from  the  authority  of  these  wise  men 
on  points,  in  which  they  were  unanimous,  and  from  the  evident 
good  sense  of  the  rules  themselves,  were  acknowledged  through 
out  the  whole  colony,  though-  they  were  never  voted  intQ  a 
formal  law,  though  the  determination  of  the  cases,  to  which 
these  rules  were  applicable,  had  not  been  intrusted  to  any  recog 
nized  judge,  nor  their  enforcement  delegated  to  any  particular 
magistrate.  Of  these  virtual  laws  this,  we  may  safely  conclude, 
would  be  the  chief:  that  as  no  man  ought  to  interfere  in  the 


276  THE    FKIEtfD. 

affairs  of  another  against  his  will,  so  if  any  master  of  a  household; 
instead  of  occupying  himself  with  the  improvement  of  his  own 
fields  and  flocks,  or  with  the  better  regulation  of  his  own  estab 
lishment,  should  be  foolish  and  wicked  enough  to  employ  his 
children  and  servants  in  breaking  down  the  fences  and  taking 
possession  of  the  lands  and  property  of  a  fellow-colonist,  or  in 
turning  the  head  of  the  family  out  of  his  house,  and  forcing  those 
that  remained  to  acknowledge  himself  as  their  governor  instead, 
and  to  obey  whomever  he  might  please  to  appoint  as  his  deputy 
— it  would  then  become  the  duty  and  the  interest  of  the  other 
colonists  to  join  against  the  aggressor,  and  to  do  all  in  their  power 
to  prevent  him  from  accomplishing  his  bad  purposes,  or  to  com 
pel  him  to  make  restitution  and  compensation.  The  mightier 
the  aggressor,  and  the  weaker  the  injured  party,  the  more  cogent 
would  the  motive  become  for  restraining  the  one  and  protecting 
the  other.  For  it  would  be  plain  that  he  who  was  suffered  to 
overpower,  one  by  one,  the  weaker  proprietors,  and  render  the 
members  of  their  establishment  subservient  to  his  will,  must  soon 
become  an  overmatch  for  those  who  were  formerly  his  equals ; 
and  the  mightiest  would  differ  from  the  meanest  only  by  being 
the  last  victim. 

This  allegoric  fable  faithfully  portrays  the  law  of  nations 
and  the  balance  of  power  among  the  European  states.  Let  us 
proceed  with  it  in  the  form  of  history.  In  the  second  or  third 
generation  the  proprietors  too  generally  disregarded  the  good  old 
opinion,  that  what  injured  any  could  be  of  real  advantage'  to 
none  ;  and  treated  those,  who  still  professed  it,  as  fit  only  to  in 
struct  children  in  their  catechism.  By  the  avarice  of  some,  the 
cowardice  of  others,  and  by  the  corruption  and  want  of  foresight 
in  the  greater  part,  the  former  state  of  things  had  been  com 
pletely  changed,  and  the  tacit  compact  set  at  naught,  the  gen 
eral  acknowledgment  of  which  had  been  so  instrumental  in  pro 
ducing  this  state  and  in  preserving  it,  as  long  as  it  lasted.  The 
stronger  had  preyed  on  the  weaker,  whose  wrongs,  however,  did 
not  remain  long  unavenged.  For  the  same  selfishness  and  blind 
ness  to  the  future,  which  had  induced  the  wealthy  to  trample  on 
the  rights  of  the  poorer  proprietors,  prevented  them  from  assist 
ing  each  other  effectually,  when  they  were  themselves  attacked, 
one  after  the  other,  by  the  most  powerful  of  all  ;  and  from  a 
concurrence  of  circumstances  attacked  so  successfully,  that  of  the 


ESSAY    XIV.  277 

whole  colony  few  remained,  that  were  not,  directly  or  indirectly, 
the  creatures  and  dependents  of  one  overgrown  establishment. 
Say  rather,  of  its  new  master,  an  adventurer  whom  chance  and 
poverty  had  brought  thither,  and  who  in  better  times  would 
have  been  employed  in  the  swine-yard,  or  the  slaughter-house, 
from  his  moody  temper  and  his  aversion  to  all  the  arts  that 
tended  to  improve  either  the  land  or  those  that  were  to  be  main 
tained  by  its  produce.  He  was  however  eminent  for  other  quali 
ties,  which  were  still  better  suited  to  promote  his  power  among 
those  degenerate  colonists  ;  for  he  feared  neither  God  nor  his 
own  conscience.  The  most  solemn  oaths  could  not  bind  him ; 
the  most  deplorable  calamities  could  not  awaken  his  pity  ;  and 
when  others  were  asleep,  he  was  either  brooding  over  some 
scheme  of  robbery  and  murder,  or  with  a  part  of  his  banditti 
actually  employed  in  laying  waste  his  neighbor's  fences,  or  in 
undermining  the  walls  of  their  houses.  His  natural  cunning, 
undistracted  by  any  honest  avocations,  and  meeting  with  no  ob 
stacle  either  -in  his  head  or  heart,  and  above  all,  having  been 
quickened  and  strengthened  by  constant  practice  and  favored  by 
the  times  with  all  conceivable  opportunities,  ripened  at  last  into 
a  surprising  genius  fqr  oppression  and  tyranny  :  and,  as  we  must 
distinguish  him  by  some  name,  we  will  call  him  Misetes.*  The 
only  estate,  which  remained  able  to  bid  defiance  to  this  common 
enemy,  was  that  of  Pamphilus,f  superior  to  Misetes  in  wealth, 
and  his  equal  in  strength  ;  though  not  in  the  power  of  doing 
mischief,  and  still  less  in  the  wish.  Their  characters  were  in 
deed  perfectly  contrasted  :  for  it  may  be  truly  said,  that  through 
out  the  whole  colony  there  was  not  a  single  establishment  which 
did  not  owe  some  of  its  best  buildings,  the  increased  produce  of 
its  fields,  its  improved  implements  of  industry,  and  the  general 
more  decent  appearance  of  its  members,  to  the  information  given 
and  the  encouragements  afforded  by  Pamphilus  and  those  of  his 
household.  Whoever  raised  more  than  they  wanted  for  their 
own  establishment,  were  sure  to  find  a  ready  purchaser  in  Pam 
philus,  and  oftentimes  for  articles  which  they  had  themselves 
been  before  accustomed  to  regard  as  worthless,  or  even  as  nui 
sances  ;  and  they  received  in  return  things  necessary  or  agreeable, 
and  always  in  one  respect  at  least  useful,  that  they  roused  the 
purchaser  to  industry  and  its  accompanying  virtues.  In  this 
*  Bonaparte.— Ed.  f  England.— JStf. 


2T8  THE    FRIEND. 

intercommunion  all  were  benefited  :  for  the  wealth  of  Pam- 
philus  was  increased  by  the  increasing  industry  of  his  fellow- 
colonists,  and  their  industry  needed  the  support  and  encouraging 
influences  of  Pamphilus's  capita].  To  this  good  man  and  his 
estimable  household  Misetes  bore  the  most  implacable  hatred,  and 
had  publicly  sworn  that  he  would  root  him  out ;  the  only  sort  of 
oath  which  he  was  not  likely  to  break  by  any  want  of  will  or 
effort  on  his  own  part. 

But  fortunately  for  Pamphilus,  his  main  property  consisted  of 
one  compact  estate  divided  from  Misetes  and  the  rest  of  the 
colony  by  a  wide  and  dangerous  river,  with  the  exception  of  one 
small  plantation  which  belonged  to  an  independent  proprietor 
whom  we  will  name  Lathrodacims  ;'*  a  man  of  no  hirlm'Urt*  ^o 
the  colony,  but  much  respected  by  Pamphilus.  They  were  in 
deed  relations  by  blood  originally,  and  afterwards  by  intermar 
riages  ;  and  it  was  to  the  power  and  protection  of  Pamphilus 
that  Lathrodacnus  owed  his  independence  and  prosperity,  amid 
the  general  distress  and  slavery  of  the  other  proprietors.  "Not 
less  fortunately  did  it  happen,  that  the  means  of  passing  the 
river  were  possessed  exclusively  by  Pamphilus  and  his  above- 
mentioned  kinsman  ;  and  not  only  the  boats  themselves,  but  all 
the  means  of  constructing  and  navigating  them.  As  the  very 
existence  of  Lathrodacnus,  as  an  independent  colonist,  had  no 
solid  ground  but  in  the  strength  and  prosperity  of  Pamphilus  ; 
and  as  the  interests  of  the  one  in  no  respect  interfered  with  those 
of  the  other  ;  Pamphilus  for  a  considerable  time  remained  with 
out  any  anxiety,  and  looked  on  the  river-craft  of  Lathrodacnus 
with  as  little  alarm,  as  on  those  of  his  own  establishment.  It 
lid  not  disquiet  him,  that  Lathrodacnus  had  remained  neutral 
in  the  quarrel.  Nay,  though  many  advantages,  which  in  peace 
ful  times  would  have  belonged  to  Pamphilus,  were  now  trans 
ferred  to  his  neighbor,  and  had  more  than  doubled  the  extent 
arid  profit  of  his  concern,  Pamphilus,  instead  of  repining  at  this, 
was  glad  that  some  good  at  least  to  some  one  came  out  of  the 
general  evil.  Great  then  was  his  surprise,  when  he  discovered, 
that  without  any  conceivable  reason  Lathrodacnus  had  employed 
himself  in  building  and  collecting  a  very  unusual  number  of 
such  boats,  as  were  of  no  us'e  to  him  in  his  traffic,  but  designed 
exclusively  as  ferry-boats  ;  and  what  was  still  stranger  and  more 
*  Denmai-k. — Ed. 


ESSAY  XIV.  279 

alarming,  that  he  chose  to  keep  these  in  a  bay  on  the  other  side 
of  the  "river,  opposite  to  the  one  small  plantation,  along-side  of 
Pamphilus's  estate,  from  which  plantation  Lathrodacnus  derived 
the  materials  for  building  them.  Willing  to  believe  this  conduct 
a  transient  whim  of  his  neighbor's,  occasioned  partly  by  his 
vanity,  and  partly  by  envy  (to  which  latter  passion  the  want  of 
a  liberal  education,  and  the  not  sufficiently  comprehending  the 
grounds  of  his  own  prosperity,  had  rendered  him  subject),  Parn- 
philus  contented  himself  for  a  while  with  urgent  yet  friendly  re 
monstrances.  The  only  answer,  which  Lathrodacnus  vouchsafed 
to  return,  was,  that  by  the  law  of  the  colony,  which  Parnphilus 
had  made  so  many  professions  of  revering.,  every  proprietor  was 
an  independent  sovereign  within  his  own  boundaries  ;  that  the 
boats  were  his  own,  and  the  opposite  shore,  to  which  they  were 
fastened,  part  of  a  field  which  belonged  to  him  ;  and,  in  short, 
that  Pamphilus  had  no  right  to  interfere  with  the  management 
of  his  property,  which,  trifling  as  it  might  be,  compared  with 
that  of  Pamphilus,  was  no  less  sacre(^by  the  laws  of  the  colony. 
To  this  uncourteous  rebuff  Pamphilus  replied  with  a  fervent  wish, 
that  Lathrodacnus  could  with  more  propriety  have  appealed  to 
a  law,  as  still  subsisting,  which,  he  well  knew,  had  been  effec 
tually  annulled  by  the  unexampled  tyranny  and  success  of 
Misetes,  Together  with  the  circumstances  which  had  given  oc 
casion  to  the  law,  and  made  it  wise  and  practicable.  He  further 
urged,  that  this  law  was  not  made  for  the  benefit  of  any  one 
man,  but  for  the  common  safety  and  advantage  of  all : — that  it 
was  absurd  to  suppose  that  either  he  (Pamphilus)  or  Lathrodacnus 
himself,  or  any  other  proprietor,  ever  did  or  could  acknowledge 
this  law  in  the  sense  that  it  was  to  survive  the  very  circum 
stances,  of  which  it  was  the  mere  reflex.  Much  less  could  they 
have  ever  tacitly  assented  to  it,  if  they  had  ever  understood  it  as 
authorizing  one  neighbor  to  endanger  the  absolute  ruin  of  an 
other,  who  had  perhaps  fifty  times  the  property  to  lose,  and  per 
haps  ten  times  the  number  of  souls  to  answer  for,  and  yet  for 
bidding  the  injured  person  to  take  any  steps  in  his  own  defence  ; 
and  lastly,  that  this  law  gave  no  right  without  imposing  a  cor 
responding  duty.  Therefore  if  Lathrodacnus  insisted  on  the 
rights  given  him  by  the  law,  he  ought  at  the  same  time  to  per 
form  the  duties  which  it  required,  and  join  heart  and  hand  with 
Parnphilus  in  his  endeavors  to  defend  his  independence,  to  restore 


280  THE    FRIEND. 

the  former  state  of  the  colony,  and  with  this  to  re-enforce  the  old 
law  in  opposition  to  Misetes  who  had  enslaved  the  one  and  set 
at  naught  the  other.  So  ardently  was  Pamphilus  attached  to 
the  law,  that  excepting  his  own  safety  and  independence  there 
was  no  price  which  he  would  not  pay,  no  sacrifice  which  ho 
would  not  make  for  its  restoration.  His  reverence  for  the  very 
memory  of  the  law  was  such,  that  the  mere  appearance  of  trans 
gressing  it  would  be  a  heavy  affliction  to  him.  In  the  hope 
therefore  of  gaining  from  the  avarice  of  Lathrodacnus  that  con 
sent  which  he  could  not  obtain  from  his  justice  or  neighborly 
kindness,  he  offered  to  give  him  in  full  right  a  plantation  ten 
times  the  value  of  all  his  boats,  and  yet,  whenever  the  colony 
should  once  more  be  settled,  to  restore  the  boats ;  if  he  would 
only  permit  Pamphilus  to  secure  them  during  the  present  state 
of  things,  on  his  side  of  the  river,  retaining  whatever  he  really 
wanted  for  the  passage  of  his  own  household. 

To  all  these  persuasions  and  entreaties  Lathrodacnus  turned  a 
deaf  ear ;  and  Pamphilus  remained  agitated  and  undetermined, 
till  at  length  he  received  Certain  intelligence  that  Lathrodacnus 
had  called  a  council  of  the  chief  members  of  his  establishment,  in 
consequence  of  the  threats  of  Misetes,  that  he  would  treat  him  as 
the  friend  and  ally  of  Pamphilus,  if  he  did  not  declare  himself 
his  enemy.  Partly  for  the  sake  of  a  large  meadow  belonging  to 
him  on  the  other  side  of  the  river  which  it  was  not  easy  to  secure 
from  the  tyrant,  but  still  more  from  envy  and  the  irritable  tem 
per  of  a  proud  inferior,  Lathrodacnus,  and  with  him  the  majority 
of  his  advisers  (though  to  the  great  discontent  of  the  few  wise 
heads  among  them)  settled  it  finally  that  if  he  should  be-  again 
pressed  on  this  point  by  Misetes,  he  would  join  him  and  commence 
hostilities  against  his  old  neighbor  and  kinsman.  It  is  indeed  but 
too  probable  that  he  had  long  brooded  over  this  scheme  :  for  to 
what  other ^end  could  he  have  strained  his  income,  and  over 
worked  his  servants  in  building  and  fitting  up  such  a  number  of 
passage-boats  ?  As  soon  as  this  information  was  received  by 
Pamphilus,  and  this  from  a  quarter  which  it  was  impossible  for 
him  to  discredit,  he  obeyed  the  dictates  of  self-preservation,  took 
possession  of  the  passage-boats  by  force,  and  brought  them  over 
to  his  own  grounds  ;  but  without  any  further  injury  to  Lathro 
dacnus,  and  still  urging  him  to  accept  a  compensation  and  con 
tinue  in  that  amity  which  was  so  manifestly  their  common  inter- 


ESSAY    XIV.  281 

est.  Instantly  a  great  outcry  was  raised  against  Pamphilus,  who 
was  charged  in  the  bitterest  terms  with  having  first  abused  Mise- 
tes,  and  then  imitated  him  in  his  worst  acts  of  violence.  In  the 
calmness  of  a  good  conscience  Pamphilus  contented  himself  with 
the  following  reply  :  "  Even  so — if  I  were  out  on  a  shooting  party 
with  a  Quaker  for  my  companion,  and  saw  coming  on  toward  us 
an  old  footpad  and  murderer,  who  had  made  known  his  intention 
of  killing  me  wherever  he  might  meet  me ;  and  if  my  companion 
the  Q,uaker  would  neither  give  me  up  his  gun,  nor  even  discharge 
it  as  (we  will  suppose)  I  had  just  before  unfortunately  discharged 
my  own  ;  if  he  would  neither  promise  to  assist  me  nor  even  prom 
ise  to  make  the  least  resistance  to  the  robber's  attempt  to  dis 
arm  himself — you  might  call  me  a  robber  for  wresting  this  gun 
from  my  companion,  though  for  no  other  purpose  but  that  I  might 
at  least  do  for  myself  what  he  ought  to  have  done,  but  would  not 
do  either  for  or  with  me !  Even  so,  and  as  plausibly,  you  might 
exclaim,  0  the  hypocrite  Pamphilus  !  Who  has  not  been  deaf 
ened  with  his  complaints  against  robbers  and  footpads  ?  and  lo  ! 
he  himself  has  turned  footpad,  and  commenced  by  robbing  his 
peaceful  and  unsuspecting  companion  of  his  double-barrelled 
gun  !" 

It  is  the  business  of  The  Friend  to  lay  down  principles,  not  to 
make  the  applications  of  them  to  particular,  much  less  to  recent 
cases.  If  any  such  there  be  to  which  these  principles  are  fairly 
applicable,  the  reader  is  no  less  master  of  the  facts  than  the  writer 
of  the  present  essay.  If  not,  the  principles  remain  ;  and  I  have 
finished  the  task  which  the  plan  of  this  work  imposed  on  me,  of 
proving  the  identity  of  international  law  and  the  law  of  morality 
in  spirit,  and  the  reasons  of  their  difference  in  practice,  in  those 
extreme  cases  in  which  alone  they  have  been  allowed  to  differ. 

POSTSCRIPT. 

The  preceding  essay  has  more  than  its  natural  interest  for  me 
from  the  abuse,  which  it  brought  down  on  me  as  the  defender  of 
the  attack  on  Copenhagen,  and  the  seizure  of  thejDanish  fleet. 
The  odium  of  the  measure  rested  wholly  on  the  commencement 
of  hostilities  without  a  previous  declaration  of  war.  Now  it  is 
remarkable,  that  in  a  work  published  many  years  before  this 
event,  Professor  Beck  had  made  this  very  point  the  subject  of  a 


S82  THE    FRIEND. 

particular  chapter  in  his  admirable  comments  on  the  Law  of  Na 
tions  :  and  every  one  of  the  circumstances  stated  by  him  as  form 
ing  an  exception  to  the  moral  necessity  of  previous  declaration  of 
war  concurred  in  the  Copenhagen  expedition.  I  need  mention 
two  only.  First,  by  the  act  or  acts,  which  provoked  the  expedi 
tion,  the  party  attacked  had  knowingly  placed  himself  in  a  state 
of  war.  Let  A  stand  for  the  Danish,  B  for  the  British  govern 
ment.  A  had  done  that  which  lie  himself  was  fully  aware  would 
produce  immediate  hostilities  on  the  part  of  B,  the  moment  it 
came  to  the  knowledge  of  the  latter.  The  act  itself  was  a  waging 
of  "war  against  B  on  the  part  of  A.  B  therefore  was  the  party 
attacked  ;  and  common  sense  dictates-,  that  to  resist  and  baffle 
an  aggression  requires  no  proclamation  to  justify  it.  I  perceive  a 
dagger  aimed  at  my  back,  in  consequence  of  a  warning  given  me, 
just  time  enough  to  prevent  the  blow,  knock  the  assassin  down, 
and  disarm  him  :  and  he  reproaches  me  with  treachery,  because 
forsooth  I  had  not  sent  him  a  challenge  !  Secondly,  when  the 
object  which  justifies  and  iiec  Jb&ii;;^?  the  war  would  be  frustrated 
by  the  proclamation.  For  neither  bidte  nor  ^dividual  can  be 
v  Burned  to  have  given  either  a  formal  GL  A  .acit  assent  to 

:v  such  modification  of  a  positive  right,  as  would  suspend  and 

Anally  annul  the  right  itself ; — the  right  of  self-preservation,  for 
'Visuar.ce.  This  second  exception  will  often  depend  on.  the  exist 
ence  of  the  first,  and  must  always  receive  additional  strength  and 
clearness  from  it.  That  both  of  these  exceptions  appertained  to 
the  case  in  question,  is  now  notorious.  But  at  the  time  I  found 
it  necessary  to  publish  the  following  comment,  which  I  now 
adapt  to  The  Friend,  as  illustrative  of  the  fundamental  prin 
ciple  of  public  justice ;  namely,  that  personal  and  national  mo 
rality,  ever  one  and  the  same,  dictate  the  same  measures  under 
the  same  circumstances,  and  different  measures  only  as  far  as*the 
circumstances  are  different. 

As  my  limits  will  not  allow  me  to  do  more  in  the  second,  or 
ethical,  section  of  The  Friend,  than  to  propose  and  develop  my 
own  system,  without  controverting  the  systems  of  others,  I  shall 
therefore  devote  the  essay,  which  follows  this  postscript,  to  the 
consideration  of  the  question  :  How  far  is  the  moral  nature  of  an 
action  constituted  by  its  individual  circumstances  1 

It  was  once  said  to  me,  when  the  Copenhagen  affair  was  in 
dispute,  "  You  do  not  see  the  enormity,  because  it  is  an  affair  be- 


ESSAY  XIV. 

tween  state  and  state  :  conceive  a  similar  case  between,  man  and 
man,  and  you  would  both  see  and  abhor  it."  Now,  I  was  neither 
defending  nor  attacking  the  measure  itself.  My  arguments  were 
confined  to  the  grounds  which  had  been  taken  both  in  the  ar 
raigning  of  that  measure  and  in  its  defence,  because  I  thought 
both  equally  untenable.  I  was  not  enough  master  of  facts  to 
form  a  decisive  opinion  on  the  enterprise,  even  for  my  own  mind  ; 
but  I  had  no  hesitation  in  affirming,  that  the  principles,  on  which 
it  was  defended  in  the  legislature,  appeared  to  me  fitter  objects 
of  indignant  reprobation  than  the  act  itself.  This  having  been 
premised,  I  replied  to  the  assertion  above  stated,  by  asserting  the 
direct  contrary  ;  namely,  that  were  a  similar  case  conceived  be 
tween  man  and  man,  the  severest  arraigners  of  the  measure  would, 
on  their  grounds,  find  nothing  to  blame  in  it.  How  was  I  to , 
prove  this  assertion  ?  Clearly,  by  imagining  some  case  between 
individuals  living  in  the  same  relation  toward  each  other,  in 
which  the  several  states  of  Europe  exist  or  existed.  My  allegory, 
therefore,  so  far  from  being  a  disguise,  was  a  necessary  part  of 
the  main  argument,  a  case  in  point,  to  prove  the  identity  of  the 
law  of  nations  with  the  law  of  conscience.  We  have  only  to  con 
ceive  individuals  in  the  same  relations  as  states,  in  order  to  learn 
that  the  rules  emanating  from  international  law,  differ  from  those 
of  private  honesty,  solely  through  the  difference  of  the  circum 
stances. 

But  why  did  I  not  avow  the  application  of  the  principle  to 
the  seizure  of  the  Danish  fleet  ?  Because  I  did  not  possess  suf 
ficient  evidence  to  prove  to  others,  or  even  to  decide  for  myself, 
that  my  principle  was  applicable  to  this  particular  act.  In  the 
case  of  Pamphilus  arid  Lathrodacnus,  the  prudence  and  necessity 
of  the  measure  were  certain  ;  and,  this  taken  for  granted,  I 
showed  its  perfect  rightfulness.  In  the  affair  of  Copenhagen,  I 
had  no  doubt  of  our  right  to  do  as  we  did,  the  necessity  supposed, 
or  at  least  the  extreme  prudence  of  the  measure  ;  it  being  taken 
for  granted  that  there  existed  a  motive  adequate  to  the  action, 
and  that  the  action  was  an  adequate  means  of  realizing  the  pur 
pose. 

But  this  I  was  not  authorized  to  take  for  granted  in  the  real, 
as  I  had  been  in  the  imaginary,  case.  I  saw  many  reasons  for 
the  affirmative,  and  many  for  the  negative.  For  the  former,  the 
certainty  of  a  hostile  design  on  the  part  of  the  Danes,  the  alarm- 


284  THE    FKIEND. 

ing  state  of  Ireland,  that  vulnerable  heel  of  the  British  Achilles, 
and  the  immense  difference  between  military  and  naval  supe 
riority.  Our  naval  power  collectively  might  have  defied  that 
of  the  whole  world  ;  but  it  was  widely  scattered,  and  a  combined 
operation  from  the  Baltic,  Holland,  Brest,  arid  Lisbon,  might  ea 
sily  bring  together  a  fleet  double  to  that  which  we  could  have 
assembled  against  it  during  the  short  time  that  might  be  neces 
sary  to  convey  thirty  or  forty  thousand  men  to  Ireland.  On  the 
other  hand,  it  seemed  equally  clear  that  Bonaparte  needed 
sailors  rather  than  ships  ;  and  that  we  took  the  ships  and  left 
him  the  Danish  sailors,  whose  presence  in  the  fleet  at  Antwerp 
turned  the  scale,  perhaps,  in  favor  of  the  worse  than  disastrous 
expedition  to  Walcheren. 

But  I  repeat,  that  I  had  no  concern  with  the  measure  itself; 
but  only  with  the  grounds  or  principles  on  which  it  had  been  at 
tacked  or  defended.  Those  who  attacked  it  declared  that  a  right 
had  been  violated  by  us,  and  that  no  motive  could  justify  such 
violation,  however  imperious  that  motive  might  be.  In  opposi 
tion  to  such  reasoners,  I  proved,  that  no  such  right  existed,  or  is 
deducible  either  from  international  law  or  the  law  of  private  mo 
rality.  Those  again  who  defended  the  seizure  of  the  Danish 
fleet,  conceded  that  it  was  a  violation  of  right  ;  but  affirmed, 
that  such  violation  was  justified  by  the  urgency  of  the  motive. 
It  was  asserted  (as  I  have  before  noticed  in  the  introduction  to 
the  subject)  that  national  policy  can  not  in  all  cases  be  subor 
dinated  to  the  laws  of  morality  ;  in  other  words,  that  a  govern 
ment  may  act  with  injustice,  arid  yet  remain  blameless.  To 
prove  this  assertion  as  groundless  and  unnecessary  as  it  is  tre 
mendous,  formed  the  chief  object  of  the  whole  disquisition.  I 
trust,  then,  that  my  candid  judges  will  rest  satisfied  that  it  is 
not  only  my  profession  arid  pretext,  but  my  constant  plan  and  ac 
tual  intention,  to  establish  principles  ;  that  I  refer  to  particular 
facts  for  no  other  purpose  than  that  of  giving  illustration  and  in 
terest  to  those  principles  ;  and  that  to  invent  principles  with  a 
view  to  particular  cases,  whether  with  the  motive  of  attacking 
or  defending  a  transitory  cabinet,  is  a  baseness  which  will  scarcely 
be  attributed  to  The  Friend  by  any  one  who  understands  the  work, 
even  though  the  suspicion  should  not  have  been  precluded  by  a 
knowledge  of  the  author. 


ESSAY  XV. 


Ja,  ich  bin  dcr  A  theist  und  Gottlose,  der  ciner  imagindren  Bcrcchnuny- 
slckre,  ciner  blossen  JEinbildung  von  allyeme'men  Folgen,  die  nie  folgen  kon- 
ncn,  zuwider — liigen  will,  ioie  Desdemona  sterbend  lag  ;  lugen  und  betriigcn 
will,  wie  der  fiir  Orcst  sich  darstellende  Pylades  ;  Tcmpelraub  unternehmen, 
wie  David ;  ja,  Aehren  ausraufen  am  Sabbath,  auch  nur  darum,  weil  mic/i 
hwigert,  und  das  Gesetz  um  des  Menschcn  willcn  gemacht  ist,  nicht  dcr 
Mensch  um  des  Gcsctzes  willen. 

Yes,  I  am  that  atheist,  that  godless  person,  who  in  opposition  to  an  imag 
inary  doctrine  of  calculation,  to  a  mere  ideal  fabric  of  general  consequences 
that  can  never  be  realized,  would  lie,  as  the  dying  Desdemoua  lied  ;*  lie 
and  deceive  as  Pylades  when  he  personated  Orestes;  would  commit  sacri 
lege  with  David ;  yea  and  pluck  ears  of  corn  on  the  Sabbath,  for  no  other 
reason  than  that  I  was  fainting  from  lack  of  food,  and  that  the  law  was  made 
for  man,  and  not  man  for  the  law.  JACOBI'S  LETTER  TO  FIOHTE. 

IF  there  be  no  better  doctrine, — I  would  add  !  Much  and 
often  have  I  suffered  from  having  ventured  to  avow  ray  doubts 
concerning  the  truth  of  certain  opinions,  which  had  been  sancti 
fied  in  the  minds  of  my  hearers  by  the  authority  of  some  reigning 
great  name  ;  even  though,  in  addition  to  my  own  reasons,  I  had 
all  the  greatest  names  from  the  Reformation  to  the  Revolution 
on  my  side.  I  could  not,  therefore,  summon  courage,  without 
some  previous  pioneering,  to  declare  publicly,  that  the  principles 
of  morality  taught  in  the  present  work  will  be  in  direct  opposi 
tion  to  the  system  of  the  late  Dr.  Paley.  This  confession  I 

Emilia. — 0  who  hath  done 
This  deed  ? 

Desd.        Nobody  ;  I  myself ;  farewell ; 
Commend  me  to  my  kind  lord. — O — farewell. 

Othello. — You  heard  her  say  yourself,  it  was  not  I. 

Emilia. — She  said  so ;  I  must  needs  report  the  truth. 

Othello. — She's,  like  a  liar,  gone  to  burning  hell ; 
'twas  I  that  killed  her. 

Emilia. — Oh  I  the  more  angel  she  ! 

Othello,  Act  v.  scene  1. 


286  THE    FRIEND. 

should  have  deferred  to  a  future  time,  if  my  opinions  011  the 
grounds  of  international  morality  had  not  been  contradictory  to  a 
fundamental  point  in  Paley's  system  of  moral  and  political  phi 
losophy.  I  mean  that  chapter  which  treats  of  general  conse 
quences,  as  the  chief  and  best  criterion  of  the  right  or  wrong  of 
particular  actions.1*  Now  this  doctrine  I  conceive  to  be  neither 
tenable  in  reason  nor  safe  in  practice  :  and  the  following  are  th* 
grounds  of  my  opinion. 

First ;  this  criterion  is  purely  ideal,  and  so  far  possesses  no 
advantages  over  the  former  systems  of  morality ;  while  it  labors 
under  defects,  with  which  those  are  not  justly  chargeable.  It  is 
ideal :  for  it  depends  on,  and  must  vary  with,  the  notions  of  the 
individual,  wrho,  in  order  to  determine  the  nature  of  an  action, 
is  to  make  the  calculation  of  its  general  consequences.  Here,  as 
in  all  other  calculation,  the  result  depends  on  that  faculty  of  the 
soul  in  the  degrees  of  which  men  most  vary  from  each  other, 
and  which  is  itself  most  affected  by  accidental  advantages  or  dis 
advantages  of  education,  natural  talent,  and  acquired  knowledge 
— the  faculty,  I  mean,  of  foresight  and  systematic  comprehension. 
But  surely  morality,  which  is  of  equal  importance  to  all  men, 
ought  to  be  grounded,  if  possible,  in  that  part  of  our  nature  which 
in  all  men  may  and  ought  to  be  the  same, — in  the  conscience 
and  the  common  sense.  Secondly :  this  criterion  confounds  mo 
rality  with  law ;  and  when  the  author  adds,  that  in  all  probabil 
ity  the  divine  Justice  will  be  regulated  in  the  final  judgment  by 
a  similar  rule,  he  draws  away  the  attention  from  the  will,  that 
is,  from  the  inward  motives  and  impulses  which  constitute  the 
essence  of  morality,  to  the  outward  act ;  and  thus  changes  the 
virtue  commanded  by  the  gospel  into  the  mere  legality,  which 
was  to  be  enlivened  by.  it.  One  of  the  most  persuasive,  if  not 
one  of  the  strongest,  arguments  for  a  future  state,  rests  on  the 
belief,  that  although  by  the  necessity  of  things  our  outward  and 
temporal  welfare  must  be  regulated  by  our  outward  actions, 
which  alone  can  be  the  objects  and  guides  of  human  law,  there 
must  yet  needs  come  a  juster  and  more  appropriate  sentence 
hereafter,  in  which  our  intentions  will  be  considered,  and  our 
happiness  and  misery  made  to  accord  with  the  grounds  of  our 
actions.  Our  fellow-creatures  can  only  judge  what  we  are  by 
what  we  do  ;  but  in  the  eye  of  our  Maker  what  we  do  is  of  no 
*  Moral  and  Political  Philosophy.  T5  II.  tne  tirst  eight  chapters. — S'i. 


ESSAY    XV.  287 

worth,  except  as  it  flows  from  what  we  are.  Though  the  fig- 
tree  should  produce  no  visible  fruit,  yet  if  the  living  sap  is  in  it, 
and  if  it  has  struggled  to  put  forth  buds  and  blossoms  which  have 
been  prevented  from  maturing  by  inevitable  contingencies  of 
tempests  or  untimely  frosts,  the  virtuous  sap  will  be  accounted  as 
fruit ;  and  the  curse  of  barrenness  will  light  on  many  a  tree  from 
the  boughs  of  which  hundreds  have  been  satisfied,  because  the 
omniscient  judge  knows  that  the  fruits  were  threaded  to  the 
boughs  artificially  by  the  outward  working  of  base  fear  and 
so] fish  hopes,  and  were  neither  nourished  by  the  love  of  God  or 
of  man,  nor  grew  out  of  the  graces  engrafted  on  the  stock  by  re 
ligion.  This  is  not,  indeed,  all  that  is  meant  in  the  Apostle's 
use  of  the  word,  faith,  as  the  sole  principle  of  justification,  but  it 
is  included  in  his  meaning,  and  forms  an  essential  part  of  it ;  and 
I  can  conceive  nothing  more  groundless,  than  the  alarm,  that 
this  doctrine  may  be  prejudicial  te  outward  utility  and  active 
well-doing.  To  suppose  that  a  man  fenould  cease  to  be  beneficent 
by  becoming  benevolent,  seems  to  me  scarcely  less  absurd,  than 
to  fear  that  a  fire  may  prevent  heat,  or  that  a  perennial  fountain 
may  prove  the  occasion  of  drought.  Just  and  generous  actions 
may  proceed  from  bad  motives,  and  both  may,  and  often  do,  ori 
ginate  in  parts,  and,  as  it  were,  fragments  of  our  nature.  A 
lascivious  man  may  sacrifice  half  his  estate  to  rescue  his  friend 
from  prison,  for  he  is  constitutionally  sympathetic,  and  the  bet 
ter  part  of  his  nature  happened  to  be  uppermost.  The  same  man 
shall  afterwards  exert  the  same  disregard  of  money  in  an  attempt 
to  seduce  that  friend's  wife  or  daughter.  But  faith  is  a  total  act 
of  the  soul :  it  is  the  whole  state  of  the  mind,  or  it  is  not  at  all ; 
and  in  this  consists  its  power,  as  well  as  its  exclusive  worth. 

This  subject  is  of  such,  immense  importance  to  the  welfare  of  all 
men,  and  the  understanding  of  it  to  the  present  tranquillity  of 
many  thousands  at  this  time  and  in  this  country,  that  should 
there  be  one  only  of  all  my  readers,  who  should  receive  conviction 
or  an  additional  light  from  what  is  here  written,  I  dare  hops 
that  a  great  majority  of  the  rest  would  in  consideration  of  that 
solitary  effect  think  these  paragraphs  neither  wholly  uninterest 
ing  nor  altogether  without  value.  For  this  cause  I  will  endeavor 
BO  to  explain  this  principle,  that  it  may  be  intelligible  to  the 
simplest  capacity.  The  Apostle  tells  those  who  would  substitute 
obedience  for  faith  (addressing  the  man  as  obedience  personified), 


THE  FRIEND. 

Know  that  thou  bearest  not  the  root,  but  the  root  thee* — a  sen 
tence  which,  methinks,  should  have  rendered  all  disputes  con 
cerning  faith  and  good  works  impossible  among  those  who  pro 
fess  to  take  the  Scriptures  for  their  guide.  It  would  appear 
incredible,  if  the  fact  were  not  notorious,  that  two  sects  should 
ground  and  justify  their  opposition  to  each  other,  the  one  on.  the 
words  of  the  Apostle,  that  we  are  justified  by  faith,  that  is,  the 
inward  and  absolute  ground  of  our  actions  ;  and  the  other  on  the 
declaration  of  Christ,  that  he  will  judge  us  according  to  our  ac 
tions.  As  if  an  action  could  be  either  good  or  bad  disjoined  from 
its  principle.  As  if  it  could  be,  in  the  Christian  and  only  proper 
sense  of  the  word,  an  action  at  all,  and  not  rather  a  mechanic 
series  of  lucky  or  unlucky  motions !  Yet  it  may  be  well  worth 
the  while  to  show  the  beauty  and  harmony  of  these  twin  truths, 
or  rather  of  this  one  great  truth  considered  in  its  two  principal 
bearings.  God  will  judge  each  man  before  all  men :  conse 
quently  he  will  judge  us  relatively  to  man.  But  man  knows 
not  the  heart  of  man  ;  scarcely  does  any  one  know  his  own.  There 
must  therefore  be  outward  and  visible  signs,  by  which  men  may 
be  able  to  judge  of  the  inward  state  ;  and  thereby  justify  the 
ways  of  God  to  their  own  spirits,  in  the  reward  or  punishment 
of  themselves  and  their  fellow-men.  Now  good  works  are  these 
signs,  and  as  such  become  necessary.  In  short  there  are  two 
parties,  God  and  the  human  race  ; — and  both  are  to  be  satisfied. 
First,  God,  who  seeth  the  root  and  knoweth  the  heart  :  therefore 
there  must  be  faith,  or  the  entire  and  absolute  principle.  Then 
man,  who  can  judge  only  by  the  fruits  :  therefore  that  faith  must 
bear  fruits  of  righteousness,  that  principle  must  manifest  itself  by 
actions.  But  that  which  God  sees,  that  alone  justifies.  What 
man  sees,  does  in  this  life  show  that  the  justifying  principle  may 
be  the  root  of  the  thing  seen  ;  but  in  the  final  judgment  God's 
acceptance  of  these  actions  will  show,  that  this  principle  actually 
was  the  root.  In  this  world  a  good  life  is  a  presumption  of  a 
good  man  :  his  virtuous  actions  are  the  only  possible,  though 

*  liom.  xi.  18.  But  remember — a  yet  deeper  and  more  momentous  sense 
is  conveyed  in  these  words.  Christ,  the  Logos,  Deltas  objectiva,  centered 
humanity  (always  pre-existing  in  the  Pleroma)  in  his  life,  and  so  became 
the  light,  that  is,  the  reason  of  mankind.  This  eternal  (that  is,  timeless) 
act  he  manifested  in  time — cap!;  t-ylvsro,  and  dwelt  among  men,  an  individ 
ual  man,  in  order  that  he  might  dwell  in  all  his  elect,  as  the  root  of  the 
divine  humanity  in  them. — 1825. 


ESSAY    XV.  289 

still  ambiguous,  manifestations  of  his  virtue  :  but  the  absence  of 
a  good  life  is  not  only  a  presumption,  but  a  proof  of  the  contrary, 
as  long  as  it  continues.  Good  works  may  exist,  without- saving 
principles,  and  therefore  can  not  contain  in  themselves  the  prin 
ciple  of  salvation  ;  but  saving  principles  never  did,  never  can, 
exist  without  good  works.  On  a  subject  of  such  infinite  impor 
tance,  I  have  feared  prolixity  less  than  obscurity.  Men  often 
talk  against  faith,  and  make  strange  monsters  in  their  imagina 
tion  of  these  who  profess  to  abide  by  the  words  of  the  Apostle 
interpreted  literally  :  and  yet  in  their  ordinary  feelings  they 
themselves  judge  and  act  by  a  similar  principle.  For  what  is 
love  without  kind  offices,  wherever  they  are  possible  ; — (and 
they  are  always  possible,  if  not  by  actions  commonly  so  called, 
•et  by  kind  words,  by  kind  looks  ;  and,  where  even  these  are  out 
of  our  power,  by  kind  thoughts  and  fervent  prayers) — yet  what 
noble  mind  would  not  be  offended,  if  he  were  supposed  to  value 
the  serviceable  offices  equally  with  the  love  that  produced  them ; 
or  if  he  were  thought  to  value  the  love  for  the  sake  of  the  ser 
vices,  and  nor  the  services  for  the  sake  of  the  love  ? 

I  return  to  the  question  of  general  consequences,  considered  as 
the  criterion  of  moral  actions.  The  admirer  of  Paley's  system  is 
required  to  suspend  for  a  short  time  the  objection,  which,  I  doubt 
not,  he  has  already  made,  that  general  consequences  are  stated 
by  Paley  as  the  criterion  of  the  action,  not  of  the  agent.  I  will 
endeavor  to  satisfy  him  on  this  point,  when  I  have  completed  my 
present  chain  of  argument.  It  has  been  shown,  that  this  crite 
rion  is  no  less  ideal  than  that  of  any  former  system  ;  that  is,  it  is 
no  less  incapable  of  receiving  any  external  experimental  proof, 
compulsory  on  the  understandings  of  all  men,  such  as  are  the 
criteria  exhibited  in  chemistry.  Yet,  unlike  the  elder  systems 
of  morality,  it  remains  in  the  world  of  the  senses,  without  deriving 
any  evidence  therefrom.  The  agent's  mind  is  compelled  to  go 
out  of  itself  in  order  to  bring  back  conjectures,  the  probability  of 
which  will  vary  with  the  shrewdness  of  the  individual.  But  this 
criterion  is  not  only  ideal  ;  it  is  likewise  imaginary.  If  we  be 
lieve  in  a  scheme  of  Providence,  all  actions  alike  work  for  good. 
Tli ere  is  not  the  least  ground  for  supposing  that  the  crimes  of 
Nero  were  less  instrumental  in  bringing  about  our  present  ad- 
vantages,  than  the  virtues  of  the  Antonines.  Lastly  ;  the  crite 
rion  is  either  nugatory  or  false.  It  is  demonstrated,  that  the 
VOL.  n.  N 


290  THE     FRIEND. 

only  real  consequences  can  not  be  meant.  The  individual  is  to 
imagine  what  the  general  consequences  would  be,  all  other  things 
remaining  the  same,  if  all  men  were  to  act  as  he  is  about  to  act. 
I  scarcely  need  remind  the  reader,  what  a  source  of  self-delusion 
and  sophistry  is  here  opened  to  a  mind  in  a  state  of  temptation. 
"Will  it  not  say  to  itself,  I  know  that  all  men  will  not  act  so  ;  and 
the  immediate  good  consequences,  which  I  shall  obtain,  are  real, 
while  the  bad  consequences  are  imaginary  and  improbable  ? 
"When  the  foundations  of  morality  have  once  been  laid  in  outward 
consequences,  it  will  be  in  vain  to  recall  to  the  mind,  what  the 
consequences  would  be,  were  all  men  to  reason  in  the  same  way : 
for  the  very  excuse  of  this  mind  to  itself  is,  that  neither  its  action 
nor  its  reasoning  is  likely  to  have  any  consequences  at  all,  its 
immediate  object  excepted.  But  suppose  the  mind  in  its  sanest 
state.  How  can  it  possibly  form  a  notion  of  the  nature  of  an  ac 
tion  considered  as  indefinitely  multiplied,  unless  it  has  previously 
a  distinct  notion  of  the  nature  of  the  single  action  itself,  which  is 
the  multiplicand  ?  If  I  conceive  a  crown  multiplied  a  hundred 
fold,  the  single  crown  enables  rne  to  understand  what  a  hundred 
crowns  are  ;  but  how  can  the  notion  hundred  teach  me  what  a 
crown  is  ?  For  the  crown  substitute  X.  Y.  or  abracadabra,  and 
my  imagination  may  multiply  it  to  infinity,  yet  remain  as  much 
at  a  loss  as  before.  But  if  there  be  any  means  of  ascertaining 
the  action  in  and  for  itself,  what  further  do  we  want  ?  Would 
we  give  light  to  the  sun,  or  look  at  our  fingers  through  a  teles 
cope  ?  The  nature  of  every  action  is  determined  by  all  its  circum 
stances  :  alter  the  circumstances  and  a  similar  set  of  motions  may 
be  repeated,  but  they  are  no  longer  the  same  or  a  similar  action. 
What  would  a  surgeon  say,  if  he  were  advised  not  to  cut  off  a 
limb,  because  if  all  men  were  to  do  the  same,  the  consequences 
would  be  dreadful  ?  Would  not  his  a^wer  be — "  Whoever  does 
the  same  under  the  same  circumstances,  and  with  the  same  mo 
tives,  will  do  right  ;  but  if  the  circumstances  and  motives  are 
different,  what  have  I  to  do  with  it  ?"  1  confess  myself  unable 
to  divine  any  possible  use,  or  even  meaning,  in  this  doctrine  of 
general  consequences,  unless  it  be,  that  in  all  our  actions  we  are 
bound  to  consider  the  effect  of  our  example,  and  to  guard  as  much 
as  possible  against  the  hazard  of  their  being  misunderstood.  I 
will  not  slaughter  a  lamb,  or  drown  a  litter  of  kittens,  in  the 
presence  of  my  child  of  four  years  old,  because  the  child  can  not 


ESSAY    XV.  291 

understand  my  action,  but  will  understand  that  his  father  has 
inflicted  pain  upon,  and  taken  away  life  from,  beings  that  had 
never  offended  him.  All  this  is  true,  and  no  man  in  his  senses 
ever  thought  otherwise.  But  rnethinks  it  is  strange  to  state  that 
as  a,  criterion  of  morality,  which  is  no  more  than  an  accessary 
aggravation  of  an  action  bad  in  its  own  nature,  or  a  ground  of 
caution  as  to  the  mode  and  time  in  which  we  are  to  do  or  sus 
pend  what  is  in  itself  good  or  innocent. 

The  duty  of  setting  a  good  example  is  no  doubt  a  most  impor 
tant  duty  ;  but  the  example  is  good  or  bad,  necessary  or  unne 
cessary,  accordingly  as  the  action  may  be,  which  has  a  chance  of 
being  imitated.  I  once  knew  a  small,  but  (in  outward  circum 
stances  at  least)  respectable  congregation,  four  fifths  of  whom 
professed  that  they  went  to  church  entirely  for  the  example's 
sake  ;  in  other  words  ta  cheat  each  other  and  act  a  common  lie  ' 
These  rational  Christians  had  not  considered  that  example  may 
increase  the  good  or  evil  of  an  action,  but  can  never  constitute 
either.  If  it  was  a  foolish  thing  to  kneel  when  they  were  not 
inwardly  praying,  or  to  sit  and  listen  to  a  discourse  of  which  they 
believed  little  and  cared  nothing,  they  were  setting  a  foolish  ex 
ample.  Persons  in  their  respectable  circumstances  do  not  think 
it  necessary  to  clean  shoes,  that  by  their  example  they  may  en 
courage  the  shoe-black  in  continuing  his  occupation  :  and  Chris 
tianity  does  not  think  so  meanly  of  herself  as  to  fear  that  the 
poor  and  afflicted  will  be  a  whit  the  less  pious,  though  they 
should  see  reason  to  believe  that  those,  who  possessed  the  good 
things  of  the  present  life,  were  determined  to  leave  all  the  bless 
ings  of  the  future  for  their  more  humble  inferiors.  If  in  this  I 
have  spoken  with  bitterness,  let  it  be  recollected  that  my  sub 
ject  is  hypocrisy. 

It  is  likewise  fit,  that  in  all  our  actions  we  should  have  con 
sidered  how  far  they  are  likely  to  be  misunderstood,  and  from 
superficial  resemblances  to  be  confounded  with,  and  so  appear  to 
authorize,  actions  of  a  very  different  character.  But  if  this  cau 
tion  be  intended  for  a  moral  rule,  the  misunderstanding  must  be 
such  as  might  be  made  by  persons  who  are  neither  very  weak  nor 
very  wicked.  The  apparent  resemblances  between  the  good  ac 
tion  we  were  about  to  do  and  the  bad  one  which  might  possibly 
be  done  in  mistaken  imitation  of  it,  must  be  obvious ;  or  that 
which  makes  them  essentially  different,  must  be  subtle  or  recon- 


292  THE    FRIEND. 

dite.  For  what  is  there  which  a  wicked  man  blinded  by  his 
passions  may  not,  and  which  a  madman  will  not,  misunderstand  ? 
It  is  ridiculous  to  frame  rules  of  morality  with  a  view  to  those 
who  are  fit  objects  only  for  the  physician  or  the  magistrate. 

The  question  may  be  thus  illustrated.  At  Florence  there  is  an 
unfinished  bust  of  Brutus,  by  Michel  Angelo,  under  which  a  car 
dinal  wrote  the  following  distich  : 

Dutn  Bruti  cffigiem  sculptor  de  marmore  finxit, 
In  mentem  sceleris  venit,  et  abstinuit. 

As  the  sculptor  was  forming  the  effigy  of  Brutus  in  marble,  lie  recollected 
his  act  of  guilt  and  refrained. 

An  English  nobleman,  indignant  at  this  inscription,  wrote 
immediately  under  it  the  following  : 

Brutum  effinxisset  sculptor,  sed  mente  recur  sat 
.  Multa  viri  virtus  ;  sistit  et  obstupuit. 

The  sculptor  would  have  framed  a  Brutus,  but  the  vast  and  manifold  virtue 
of  the  man  flashed  upon  his  thought :  he  stopped  and  remained  in  as 
tonished  admiration. 

Now  which  is  the  nobler  and  more  moral  sentiment,  the 
Italian  cardinal's,  or  the  English  nobleman's  ?  The  cardinal 
would  appeal  to  the  doctrine  of  general  consequences,  and  pro 
nounce  the  death  of  Cresar  a  murder,  and  Brutus  an  assassin. 
For  (he  would  say)  if  one  man  may  be  allowed  to  kill  another 
because  he  thinks  him  a  tyrant,  religious  or  political. frenzy  may 
stamp  the  name  of  tyrant  on  the  best  of  kings  :  regicide  will  be 
justified  under  the  pretence  of  tyrannicide,  and  Brutus  be  quoted 
as  authority  for  the  Clements  and  Ravailliacs.^  From  kings  it 
may  pass  to  generals  and  statesmen,  and  from  these  to  any  man 
whom  an  enemy  or  enthusiast  may  pronounce  unfit  to  live. 
Thus  we  may  have  a  cobbler  of  Messina  in  every  city,  andbravos 
in  our  streets  as  common  as  in  those  of  Naples,  with  the  name  of 
Brutus  on  their  stilettos. 

The  Englishman  would  commence  his  answer  by  commenting 
on  the  words  "  because  he  thinks  him  a  tyrant."  No  !  he  would 
reply,  not  because  the  patriot  thinks  him  a  tyrant ;  but  because 

*  Jacques  Clement,  a -monk,  who  stabbed  Henry  III.  of  France,  and 
Francois  Ravailliac,  an  attorney,  the  well-known  assassin  of  Henry  IV. — E(L 


ESSAY    XV.  293 

he  knows  him  to  be  so,  and  knows  likewise,  that  the  vilest  of  his 
slaves  can  not  deny  the  fact,  that  he  has  by  violence  raised  him 
self  above  the  laws  of  his  country — because  he  knows  that  all  good 
and  wise  men  equally  with  himself  abhor  the  fact.  If  there  be 
no  such  state  as  that  of  being  broad  awake,  or  no  means  of  dis 
tinguishing  it  when  it  exists  ;  if  because  men  sometimes  dream 
that  they  are  awake,  it  must  follow  that  no  man,  when  awake, 
can  be  sure  that  he  is  not  dreaming  ;  if  because  a  hypochondriac 
is  positive  that  his  legs  are  cylinders  of  glass,  all  other  men  are 
to  learn  modesty,  and  cease  to  be  certain  that  their  legs  are  legs  ; 
what  possible  advantage  can  your  criterion  of  general  conse 
quences  possess  over  any  other  rule  of  direction  ?  If  no  man  can 
be  sure  that  what  he  thinks  a  robber  with  a  pistol  at  his  breast 
demanding  his  purse,  may  not  be  a  good  friend  inquiring  after  his 
health  ;  or  that  a  tyrant  (the  son  of  a  cobbler  perhaps,  who  at 
the  head  of  a  regiment  of  perjured  traitors,  has  driven  the  repre 
sentatives  of  his  country  out  of  the  senate  at  the  point  of  the 
bayonet,  subverted  the  constitution  which  had  trusted,  enriched, 
and  honored  him,  trampled  on  the  laws  which  before  God  and 
man  he  had  sworn  to  obey,  and  finally  raised  himself  above  all 
law)  may  not,  in  spite  of  his  own  and  his  neighbors'  knowledge 
of  the  contrary,  be  a  lawful  king,  who  has  received  his  power, 
however  despotic  it  may  be,  from  the  kings  his  ancestors,  who 
exercises  no  other  power  than  what  had  been  submitted  to  for 
centuries,  and  been  acknowledged  as  the  law  of  the  country  ;  on 
what  ground  can  you  possibly  expect  less  fallibility,  or  a  result 
more  to  be  relied  upon,  in  the  same  man's  calculation  of  your 
general  consequences  ?  Would  he,  at  least,  find  any  difficulty  in 
converting  your  criterion  into  an  authority  for  his  act  ?  What 
should  prevent  a  man,  whose  perceptions  and  judgments  are  so 
strangely  distorted,  from  arguing,  that  nothing  is  more  devoutly 
to  be  wished  for,  as  a  general  consequence,  than  that  every  man, 
who  by  violence  places  himself  above  the  laws  of  his  country, 
should  in  all  ages  and  nations  be  considered  by  mankind  as  placed 
by  his  own  act  out  of  the  protection  of  law,,  and  be  treated  by 
them  as  any  other  noxious  wild  beast  would  be  ?  Do  you  think 
it  necessary  to  try  adders  by  a  jury  ?  Do  you  hesitate  to  shoot  a 
mad  dog,  because  it  is  not  in  your  power  to  have  him  first  tried 
and  condemned  at  the  Old  Bailey  ?  On  the  other  hand,  what 
consequence  can  be  conceived  more  detestable,  than  one  which 


294  THE    FRIEND. 

would  set  a  bounty  on  the  most  enormous  crime  in  human  nature, 
'and  establish  it  as  a  law  of  religion  and  morality  that  the  accom 
plishment  of  the  most  atrocious  guilt  invests  the  perpetrator  with 
impunity,  and  renders  his  person  forever  sacred  and  inviolable  ? 
For  madmen  and  enthusiasts  what  avail  your  moral  criterions  ? 
But  as  to  your  Neapolitan  bravos,  if  the  act  of  Brutus  who 

In^pity  to  the  general  wrong  of  Rome, 
Slew  his  best  lover  for  the  good  of  Rome, 

authorized  by  the  laws  of  his  country,  in  manifest  opposition  to 
all  selfish  interest,  in  the  face  of  the  senate,  and  instantly  pre 
senting  himself  and  his  cause  first  to  that  senate,  and  then  to  the 
assembled  commons,  by  them  to  stand  acquitted  or  condemned — 
if  such  an  act  as  this,  with  all  its  vast  outfitting  circumstances 
of  distinction,  can  be  confounded  by  any  mind,  not  frantic,  with 
the  crime  of  a  cowardly  skulking  assassin  who  hires  out  his  dag 
ger  for  a  few  crowns  to  gratify  a  hatred  not  his  own,  or  even  with 
the  deed  of  that  man  who  makes  a  compromise  between  his  re 
venge  and  his  cowardice,  and  stabs  in  the  dark  the  enemy  whom 
he  dared  not  meet  in  the  open  field,  or  summon  before  the  laws 
of  his  country — what  actions  can  be  so  different,  that  they  may 
not  be  equally  confounded  ?  The  ambushed  soldier  must  not  fire 
his  musket,  lest  his  example  should  be  quoted  by  the  villain 
who,  to  make  sure  of  his  booty,  discharges  his  piece  at  the  un 
suspicious  passenger  from  behind  a  hedge.  The  physician  must 
not  administer  a  solution  of  arsenic  to  the  leprous,  lest  his  exam 
ple  should  be  quoted  by  professional  poisoners.  If  110  distinction, 
full  and  satisfactory  to  the  conscience  and  common  sense  of  man 
kind  be  afforded  by  the  detestation  and  horror  excited  in  all  men, 
(even  in  the  meanest  and  most  vicious,  if  they  are  not  wholly 
monsters)  by  the  act  of  the  assassin,  contrasted  with  the  fervent 
admiration  felt  by  the  good  and  wise  in  all  ages  when  they  men 
tion  the  name  of  Brutus  ;  contrasted  with  the  fact  that  the  honor 
or  disrespect  with  which  that  name  was  spoken  of,  became  an 
historic  criterion  of  a  nobler  or  a  base  age  ;  and  if  it  is  in  vain 
that  our  own  hearts  answer  to  the  question  of  the  poet — 

Is  there  among  the  adamantine  spheres, 
Wheeling  unshaken  through  the  boundless  void, 
Aught  that  with  half  such  majesty  can  fill 
The  human  bosom,  as  when  Brutus  rose 


ESSAY    XV.  295 

Refulgent  from  the  stroke  of  Caesar's  fate 
Amid  the  crowd  of  patriots  ;  and  his  arm 
Aloft  extending,  like  eternal  Jove, 
When  guilt  brings  down  the  thunder,  call'd  aloud 
On  Tully's  name,  and  shook  his  crimson  sword, 
And  bade  the  father  of  his  country,  hail ! 
For  lo !  the  tyrant  prostrate  on  the  dust 
And  Rome  again  is  free  ! —  * 

If,  I  say,  all  this  be  fallacious  and  insufficient,  can  we  have 
any  firmer  reliance  on  a  cold  ideal  calculation  of  imaginary  gen 
eral  consequences,  which,  if  they  were  general,  could  not  be  con 
sequences  at  all  :  for  they  would  be  effects  of  the  frenzy  or  fren 
zied  wickedness,  which  alone  could  confound  actions  so  utterly 
dissimilar  ?  No  !  (would  the  ennobled  descendant  of  our  Russells 
or  Sidneys  conclude).  No  !  calumnious  bigot !  never  yet  did  a 
human  being  become  an  assassin  from  his  own  or  the  general  ad 
miration  of  the  hero  Brutus  ;  but  I  dare  not  warrant,  that  vil 
lains  might  not  be  encouraged  in  their  trade  of  secret  murder, 
by  finding  their  own  guilt  attributed  to  the  Roman  patriot,  and 
might  not  conclude,  that  if  Brutus  be  no  better  than  an  assassin, 
an  assassin  can  be  no  worse  than  Brutus. 

I  request  that  the  preceding  be  not  interpreted  as  my  own 
judgment  on  tyrannicide.  I  think  with  Machiavel  and  with 
Spinosa,  for  many  and  weighty  reasons  assigned  by  those  philoso 
phers,  that  it  is  difficult  to  conceive  a  case,  in  wrhich  a  good  man 
would  attempt  tyrannicide,  because  it  is  difficult  to  conceive  one, 
in  which  a  wise  man  would  recommend  it.  In  a  small  state, 
included  within  the  walls  of  a  single  city,  and  where  the  tyranny 
is  maintained  by  foreign  guards,  it  may  be  otherwise  ;  but  in  a 
nation  or  empire  it  is  perhaps  inconceivable,  that  the  circum 
stances  which  made  a  tyranny  possible,  should  not  likewise  render 
the  removal  of  a  tyrant  useless.  The  patriot's  sword  may  cut 
off  the  Hydra's  head ;  but  he  possesses  no  brand  to  stanch  the 
active  corruption  of  the  body,  which  is  sure  to  re-produce  a  suc- 


*  Akenside.     Pleasures  of  the  Imagination,  2d  ed.  B.  II.  p.  361. — Ed. 

" and  shook  the  crimson  sword 

Of  justice  in  his  rapt,  astonish'd  eye, 
And  bade"  <fec. 

So  in  the  original.    S.  0. 


296  THE    FKIEND. 

I  must  now  in  a  few  words  answer  the  objection  to  the  for 
mer  part  of  my  argument  (for  to  that  part  only  the  objection 
applies),  namely,  that  the  doctrine  of  general  consequences  was 
stated  as  the  criterion  of  the  action,  not  of  the  agent.  I  might 
answer,  that  the  author  himself  had  in  some  measure  justified 
me  in  not  noticing  this  distinction  by  holding  forth  the  probabil 
ity,  that  the  Supreme^  Judge  will  proceed  by  the  same  rule.  The 
agent  may  then  safely  be  included  in  the  action,  if  both  here  and 
hereafter  the  action  only  and  its  general  consequences  will  be 
attended  to.  But  my  main  ground  of  justification  is,  that  the 
distinction  itself  is  merely  logical,  not  real  and  vital.  The  char 
acter  of  the  agent  is  determined  by  his  view  of  the  action  :  and 
that  system  of  morality  is  alone  true  and  suited  to  human  nature, 
which  unites  the  intention  and  the  motive,  the  warmth  and  the 
light,  in  one  and  the  same  act  of  mind.  This  alone  is  worthy 
to  be  called  a  moral 'principle.  Such  a  principle  may  be  ex 
tracted,  though  not  without  difficulty  and  danger,  from  the  ore 
of  the  Stoic  philosophy ;  but  it  is  to  be  found  unalloyed  and 
entire  in  the  Christian  system,  and  is  there  called  faith.* 


ESSAY    XVI. 

THE  following  address  was  delivered  at  Bristol,  in  the  month 
of  February,  1795.  The  only  omissions  regard  the  names  of  per 
sons  ;  and  I  insert  it  here  in  support  of  the  assertion  made  by  me, 
in  the  beginning  of  Essay  II.  of  this  volume,  and  because  this 
very  address  has  been  referred  to  in  an  infamous  libel  in  proof  of 
my  former  Jacobinism.  Different  as  my  present  convictions  are 

*  It  may,  perhaps,  be  not  uninteresting  to  insert  in  this  place  a  not* 
which  Mr.  Coleridge  wrote  in  his  own  copy  of  The  Friend : — 

'  This  last  paragraph  falls  off  from  all  the  preceding.  The  reasoning  i? 
just,  but  it  is  dimly  stated, — not  brought  out,  nor  urged  to  the  point 
Want  of  space  was  the  original  cause  of  this  deficiency.  The  Friend  ap 
pearing  on  stamped  sheets,  and  the  author  haying  reached  the  sixteenth 
page  in  the  treatment  of  the  moral  question,  he  was  forced  to  compress  the 
promised  answer  to  the  objection  into  the  remainder  of  a  single  page ; — and 
in  the  attempt  slurred  it  over.'  22d  June,  1829. — Ed, 


ESSAY    XVI.  297 

on  the  subject  of  philosophical  necessity,  I  have  for  this  reason 
left  the  last  paragraph  unaltered.* 


'Act  yap  Tr/$  ^evdepia^  tyieftai'  rrohha  d£  ev  nal  role  if>t%,efav8l 


For  I  am  always  a  lover  of  liberty  ;  but  iu  those  who  would  appropriate 
the  title,  I  find  too  many  points  destructive  of  liberty  aud  hateful  to  her 
genuine  advocates. 

Companies  resembling  the  present  will,  from  a  variety  of  cir 
cumstances,  consist  chiefly  of  the  zealous  advocates  for  freedom. 
It  will,  therefore,  be  our  endeavor,  not  so  much  to  excite  the  tor 
pid,  as  to  regulate  the  feelings  of  the  ardent  :  and  above  all,  to 
evince  the  necessity  of  bottoming  on  fixed  principles,  that  so  we 
may  not  be  the  unstable  patriots  of  passion  or  accident,  nor  hur 
ried  away  by  names  of  which*  we  have  not  sifted  the  meaning, 
and  by  tenets  of  which  we  have  not  examined  the  consequences. 
The  times  are  trying  ;  and  in  order  to  be  prepared  against  their 
difficulties,  we  should  have  acquired  a  prompt  facility  of  advert 
ing  in  all  our  doubts  to  some  grand  and  comprehensive  truth.  In 
a  deep  and  strong  soil  must  that  tree  fix  its  roots,  the  height  of 
which  is  to  reach  to  heaven,  and  the  sight  of  it  to  the  ends  of  all 
the  earth. 

The  example  of  France  is  indeed  a  warning  to  Britain.  A  na 
tion  wading  to  its  rights  through  blood,  and  marking  the  track  of 
freedom  by  devastation  !  Yet  let  us  riot  embattle  our  feelings 
against  our  reason.  Let  us  not  indulge  our  malignant  passions 
under  the  mask  of  humanity.  Instead  of  railing  with  infuriate 
declamation  against  these  excesses,  we  shall  be  more  profitably 
employed  in  tracing  them  to  their  sources.  French  freedom  is 
the  beacon  which  if  it  guides  to  equality  should  show  us  likewise 
the  dangers  that  throng  the  road. 

The  annals  of  the  French  revolution  have  recorded  in  letters 
of  blood,  that  the  knowledge  of  the  few  can  not  counteract  the 
ignorance  of  the  many  ;  that  the  light  of  philosophy,  when  it  is 
confined  to  a  small  minority,  points  out  the  possessors  as  the  vic 
tims,  rather  than  the  illuminators,  of  the  multitude.  The  pa- 

*  This  speech,  or  lecture,  was,  with  another  on  the  then  war  with  France, 
published  in  November,  1795,  under  the  title  Condones  ad  populum,  Iu 
this  edition  the  author  has  made  some  alterations,  but  they  are  confined  to 
the  mere  stvle.  —  Ed. 


298  THE    FRIEND. 

triots  of  France  either  hastened  into  the  dangerous  and  gigantic 
error  of  making  certain  evil  the  means  of  contingent  good,  or 
were  sacrificed  by  the  mob,  with  whose  prejudices  and  ferocity 
their  unbending  virtue  forbade  them  to  assimilate.  Like  Sam 
son,  the  people  were  strong — like  Samson,  the  people  were  blind. 
'  Those  two  massy  pillars'  of  the  temple  of  oppression,  their  mon 
archy  and  aristocracy, 

With  horrible  convulsion  to  and  fro 

They  tugg'd,  they  shook — till  down  they  came  and  drew 

The  whole  roof  after  them  with  burst  of  thunder 

Upon  the  heads  of  all  who  sat  beneath, 

Lords,  ladies,  captains,  counsellors,  and  priests, 

Their  choice  nobility  !* 

The  Girondists,  who  were  the  first  republicans  in  power,  were 
men  of  enlarged  views  and  great  literary  attainments ;  but  they 
seem  to  have  been  deficient  in  that  vigor  and  daring  activity,, 
which  circumstances  made  necessary.  Men  of  genius  are  rarely 
either  prompt  in  action  or  consistent  in  general  conduct.  Their 
early  habits  have  been  those  of  contemplative  indolence  ;  and 
the  day-dreams,  with  which  they  have  been  accustomed  to  amuse 
their  solitude,  adapt  them  for  splendid  speculation,  not  temper 
ate  and  practicable  counsels.  Brissot,  the  leader  of  the  Gironde 
party,  is  entitled  to  the  character  of  a  virtuous  man,  and  an  elo 
quent  speaker;  but  he  was  rather  a  sublime  visionary,  than  a 
quick-eyed  politician  ;  and  his  excellences  equally  with  his  faults 
rendered  him  unfit  for  the  helm  in  the  stormy  hour  of  revolution. 
Robespierre,  who  displaced  him,  possessed  a  glowing  ardor  that 
still  remembered  the  end,  and  a  cool  ferocity  that  never  either 
overlooked  or  scrupled  the  means.  "What  this  end  was,  is  not 
known  :  that  it  was  a  wicked  one,  has  by  no  means  been  proved. 
I  rather  think,  that  the  distant  prospect,  to  which  he  was  travel 
ling,  appeared  to  him  grand  and  beautiful  ;  but  that  he  fixed  his 
eye  on  it  with  such  intense  eagerness  as  to  neglect  the  foulness 
of  the  road.  If,  however,  his  first  intentions  were  pure,  his  sub 
sequent  enormities  yield  us  a  melancholy  proof,  that  it  is  not  the 
character  of  the  possessor  which  directs  the  power,  but  the  power 
which  shapes  and  depraves  the  character  of  the  possessor.  In 
Robespierre,  its  influence  was  assisted  by  the  properties  of  his 

*  Samson  Agonistes,  with  alterations  in  italics. — Ed. 


ESSAY    XVI.  299 

disposition.  Enthusiasm,  even  in  the  gentlest  temper,  will  fre 
quently  generate  sensations  of  an  unkindly  order.  If  we  clearly 
perceive  any  one  thing  to  be  of  vast  and  infinite  importance  to 
ourselves  and  all  mankind,  our  first  feelings  impel  us  to  turn  with 
angry  contempt  from  those,  who  doubt  and  oppose  it.  The  ardor 
of  undisciplined  benevolence  seduces  us  into  malignity  :  and  when 
ever  our  hearts  are  warm,  and  our  objects  great  and  excellent, 
intolerance  is  the  sin  that  does  most  easily  beset  us.  But  this 
enthusiasm  in  Robespierre  was  blended  with  gloom,  and  suspi- 
ciousness,  and  inordinate  vanity.  His  dark  imagination  was  still 
brooding  over  supposed  plots  against  freedom  ; — to  prevent  tyr 
anny  he  became  a  tyrant,  and  having  realized  the  evils  which  he 
suspected,  a  wild  and  dreadful  tyrant.  And  thus,  his  ear  deaf 
ened  to  the  whispers  of  conscience  by  the  clamorous  plaudits  of 
the  mob,  he  despotized  in  all  the  pomp  of  patriotism,  and  masquer 
aded  on  the  bloody  stage  of  revolution,  a  Caligula  with  the  cap 
of  liberty  on  his  head. 

It  has  been  affirmed,  and  I  believe  with  truth,  that  the  sys 
tem  of  terrorism,  by  suspending  the  struggles  of  contrariant  fac 
tions,  communicated  an  energy  to  the  operations  of  the  republic 
which  had  been  hitherto  unknown,  and  without  which  it  could 
not  have  been  preserved.  The  system  depended  for  its  existence 
on  the  general  sense  of  its  necessity,  and  when  it  had  answered 
its  end,  it  was  soon  destroyed  by  the  same  power  that  had  given 
it  birth — popular  opinion.  It  must  not  however  be  disguised, 
that  at  all  times,  but  more  especially  when  the  public  feelings 
are  wavy  and  tumultuous,  artful  demagogues  may  create  this 
opinion  :  and  they,  who  are  inclined  to  tolerate  evil  as  the 
means  of  contingent  good,  should  reflect,  that  if  the  excesses  of 
terrorism  gave  to  the  republic  that  efficiency  and  repulsive  force 
which  its  circumstances  made  necessary,  they  likewise  afforded 
to  the  hostile  courts  the  most  powerful  support,  and  excited  that 
indignation  and  horror  which  everywhere  precipitated  the  sub 
ject  into  the  designs  of  the  ruler.  JSTor  let  it  be  forgotten  that 
these  excesses  perpetuated  the  war  in  La  Vendee,  and  made  it 
more  terrible,  both  by  the  accession  of  numerous  partisans,  who 
had  fled  from  the  persecution  of  Robespierre,  and  by  inspiring 
the  Chouans  with  fresh  fury,  and  an  unsubmitting  spirit  of  re 
venge  and  desperation. 

Revolutions    are   sudden  to   the    unthinking    only.      Strange 


300  THE    FRIEND. 

rumblings  and  confused  noises  still  precede  these  earthquakes 
and  hurricanes  of  the  moral  world.  The  process  of  revolution 
in  France  has  been  dreadful,  and  should  incite  us  to  examine 
with  an  anxious  eye  the  motives  and  manners  of  those,  whose 
conduct  and  opinions  seem  calculated  to  forward  a  similar  event 
in  our  own  country.  The  oppositionists  to  "  things  as  they  are," 
are  divided  into  many  and  different  classes.  To  delineate  them 
with  an  unflattering  accuracy  may  be  a  delicate,  but  it  is  a  neces 
sary  task,  in  order  that  we  may  enlighten,  or  at  least  be  aware 
of,  the  misguided  men  who  have  enlisted  under  the  Jbanners  of 
liberty,  from  no  principles,  or  with  bad  ones  :  whether  they  be 
those,  who 

admire  they  know  not  what, 
And  know  not  whom,  but  as  one  leads  to  the  other  ; — 

or  whether  those, 

Whose  end  is  private  hate,  not  help  to  freedom, 
Adverse  and  turbulent  when  she  would  lead 
To  virtue. 

The  majority  of  democrats  appear  to  me  to  have  attained  that, 
portion  of  knowledge  in  politics,  which  infidels  possess  in  reli 
gion.  I  would  by  no  means  be  supposed  to  imply  that  the  ob 
jections  of  both  are  equally  unfounded,  but  that  they  both  at 
tribute  to  the  system  which  they  reject,  all  the  evils  existing 
under  it ;  and  that  both,  contemplating  truth  and  justice  in  the 
nakedness  of  abstraction,  condemn  constitutions  and  dispensations 
without  having  sufficiently  examined  the  natures,  circumstances, 
and  capacities  of  their  recipients. 

The  first  class  among  the  professed  friends  of  liberty  is  com 
posed  of  men,  who  unaccustomed  to  the  labor  of  thorough  inves 
tigation,  and  not  particularly  oppressed  by  the  burthens  of  state, 
are  yet  impelled  by  their  feelings  to  disapprove  of  its  grosser  de 
pravities,  and  prepared  to  give  an  indolent  vote  in  favor  of  reform. 
Their  sensibilities  not  braced  by  the  co-operation  of  fixed  princi 
ples,  they  offer  no  sacrifices  to  the  divinity  of  active  virtue. 
Their  political  opinions  depend  with  weathercock  uncertainty  on 
the  winds  of  rumor,  that  blow  from  France.  On  the  report  of 
French  victories  they  blaze  into  republicanism,  at  a  tale  of  French 
excesses  they  darken  into  aristocrats.  These  dough-baked  patriots 
are  not,  however,  useless.  This  oscillation  of  political  opinion 


ESSAY    XVI,  SOI 

will  retard  the  day  of  revolution,  arid  it  will  operate  as  a  preven 
tive  to  its  excesses.  Indecisiveness  of  character,  though  the  ef 
fect  of  timidity,  is  almost  always  associated  with  benevolence. 

Wilder  features  characterize  the  second  class.  Sufficiently 
possessed  of  natural  sense  to  despise  the  priest,  and  of  natural 
feeling  to  hate  the  oppressor,  they  listen  only  to  the  inflammatory 
harangues  of  some  mad-headed  enthusiast,  and  imbibe  from  them 
poison,  not  food  ;  rage,  not  liberty.  Unillumined  by  philosophy, 
and  stimulated  to  a  lust  of  revenge  by  agg»vated  wrongs,  they 
would  make  the  altar  of  freedom  stream  with  blood,  while  the 
grass  grew  in  the  desolated  halls  of  justice. 

"We  contemplate  those  principles  with  horror.  Yet  they  pos 
sess  a  kind  of  wild  justice,  well  calculated  to  spread  them  among 
the  grossly  ignorant.  To  unenlightened  minds,  there  are  terrible 
charms  in  the  idea  of  retribution,  however  savagely  it  be  incul 
cated.  The  groans  of  the  oppressor  make  fearful  yet  pleasant 
music  to  the  ear  of  him,  whose  mind  is  darkness,  and  into  whose 
soul  the  iron  has  entered. 

This  class,  at  present,  is  comparatively  small — yet  soon  to  form 
an  overwhelming  majority,  unless  great  and  immediate  efforts 
are  used  to  lessen  the  intolerable  grievances  of  our  poor  brethren, 
and  infuse  into  their  sorely-wounded  hearts  the  healing  quali 
ties  of  knowledge.  For  can  we  wonder  that  men  should  want 
humanity,  who  want  all  the  circumstances  of  life  that  humanize  ? 
Can  we  wonder  that  with  the  ignorance  of  brutes,  they  should 
unite  their  ferocity  ?  Peace  and  comfort  be  with  these  !  But 
let  us  shudder  to  hear  from  men  of  dissimilar  opportunities  sen 
timents  of  similar  revengefulness.  The  purifying  alchemy  of 
education  may  transmute  the  fierceness  of  an  ignorant  man  into 
virtuous  energy  ;  but  .what  remedy  shall  we  apply  to  him  whom 
plenty  has  not  softened,  whom  knowledge  has  not  taught  be 
nevolence  ?  This  is  one  among  the  many  fatal  effects  which  re 
sult  from  the  want  of  fixed  principles. 

There  is  a  third  class  among  the  friends  of  freedom,  who  pos 
sess  not  the  wavering  character  of  the  first  description,  nor  the 
ferocity  last  delineated.  They  pursue  the  interests  of  freedom 
steadily,  but  with  narrow  and  self-centering  views  :  they  antici 
pate  with  exultation  the  abolition  of  privileged  orders,  and  of 
acts  that  persecute  by  exclusion  from  the  rights  of  citizenship. 
"Whatever  is  above  them  they  are  most  willing  to  drag  down ; 


802  THE    FRIEND. 

but  every  proposed  alteration  that  would  elevate  their  poorer 
brethren,  they  rank  among  the  dreams  of  visionaries  ;  as  if  there 
were  any  thing  in  the  superiority  of  lord  to  gentleman  so  morti 
fying  in  the  barrier,  so  fatal  to  happiness  in  the  consequences,  as 
the  more  real  distinction  of  master  and  servant,  of  rich  man  and 
of  poor.  Wherein  am  I  made  worse  by  my  ennobled  neighbor  ? 
Do  the  childish  titles  of  aristocracy  detract  from  my  domestic 
comforts,  or  prevent  my  intellectual  acquisitions  ?  But  those 
institutions  of  society  which  should  condemn  me  to  the  necessity 
of  twelve  hours'  daily  toil,  would  make  my  soul  a  slave,  and 
sink  the  rational  being  in  the  mere  animal.  It  is  a  mockery  of 
our  fellow-creatures'  wrongs  to  call  them  equal  in  rights,  when 
by  the  bitter  compulsion  of  their  wants  we"  make  them  inferior 
to  us  in  all  that  can  soften  the  heart,  or  dignify  the  understand 
ing.  Let  us  not  say  that  this  is  the  work  of  time — that  it  is 
impracticable  at  present,  unless  we  each  in  our  individual  capa 
cities  do  strenuously  and  perseveringly  endeavor  to  diffuse  among 
our  domestics  those  comforts  and  that  illumination  which  far 
beyond  all  political  ordinances  are  the  true  equalizers  of  men. 

We  turn  with  pleasure  to  the  contemplation  of  that  small  but 
glorious  band,  whom  we  may  truly  distinguish  by  the  name  of 
thinking  and  disinterested  patriots.  These  are  the  men  who 
have  encouraged  the  sympathetic  passions  till  they  have  become 
irresistible  habits,  and  made  their  duty  a  necessary  part  of  their 
self-interest,  by  the  long-continued  cultivation  of  that  moral  taste 
which  derives  our  most  exquisite  pleasures  from  the  contempla 
tion  of  possible  perfection,  and  proportionate  pain  from  the  per 
ception  of  existing  depravity.  Accustomed  to  regard  all  the 
affairs  of  man  as  a  process,  they  never  hurry  and  they  never 
pause.  Theirs  is  not  that  twilight  of  political  knowledge  which 
gives  us  just  light  enough  to  place  one  foot  before  the  other  :  as 
they  advance  the  sceile  still  opens  upon  them,  and  they  press 
right  onward  with  a  vast  and  various  landscape  of  existence 
around  them.  Calmness  and  energy  mark  all  their  actions. 
Convinced  that  vice  originates  not  in  the  man,  but  in  the  sur 
rounding  circumstances  ;  not  in  the  heart,  but  in  the  understand 
ing  ;  the  Christian  patriot  is  hopeless  concerning  no  one  ; — to 
correct  a  vice  or  generate  a  virtuous  conduct,  he  pollutes  not  his 
hands  with  the  scourge  of  coercion  ;  but  by  endeavoring  to  alter 
circumstances  wculd  remove,  or  by  strengthening  the  intellect 


ESSAY    XVI.  303 

disarm,  the  temptation.  The  unhappy  children  of  vice  and  folly, 
whose  tempers  are  adverse  to  their  own  happiness  as  well  as  to 
the  happiness  of  others,  will  at  times  awaken  a  natural  pang- ; 
but  he  looks  forward  with  gladdened  heart  to  that  glorious  period 
when  justice  shall  have  established  the  universal  fraternity  of 
love.  These  soul-ennobling  views  bestow  the  virtues  which  they 
anticipate.  He  whose  mind  is  habitually  impressed  with  them 
soars  above  the  present  state  of  humanity,  and  may  be  justly 
said  to  dwell  in  the  presence  of  the  Most  High. 

"Would  the  forms 

Of  servile  custom  cramp  the  patriot's  power  ? 
Would  sordid  policies,  the  barbarous  growth 
Of  ignorance  and  rapine,  bow  him  down 
To  tame  pursuits,  to  indolence  and  fear  ? 
Lo  ! — lie  appeals  to  nature,  to  the  winds 
And  rolling  waves,  the  sun's  unwearied  course, 
The  elements  and  seasons  :  all  declare 
For  what  the  Eternal  Maker  has  ordain'd 
The  powers  of  man :  we  feel  within  ourselves 
His  energy  divine :  he  tells  the  heart 
He  meant,  he  made,  us  to  behold  and  love 
What  he  beholds  and  loves,  the  general  orb 
Of  life  and  being — to  be  great  like  him, 
Beneficent  and  active.* 

That  general  illumination  should  precede  revolution,  is  a  truth 
as  obvious,  as  that  the  vessel  should  be  cleansed  before  we  fill  it 
with  a  pure  liquor.  But  the  mode  of  diffusing  it  is  not  discover 
able  with  equal  facility.  "We  certainly  should  never  attempt  to 
make  proselytes  by  appeals  to  the  selfish  feelings,  and  conse 
quently,  should  plead  for  the  oppressed,  not  to  them.  The  author 
of  an  essay  on  political  justice  considers  private  societies  as  the 
sphere  of  real  utility  ; — that  (each  one  illuminating  those  imme 
diately  beneath  him),  truth  by  a  gradual  descent  may  at  last 
reach  the  lowest  order.  But  this  is  rather  plausible  than  just  or 
practicable.  Society  as  at  present  constituted  does  not  resemble 
a  chain  that  ascends  in  a  continuity  of  links.  Alas  !  between 
the  parlor  and  the  kitchen,  the  coffee-room  and  the  tap,  there  is 
a  gulf  that  may  not  be  passed.  He  would  appear  to  me  to  have 
adopted  the  best  as  well  as  the  most  benevolent  mode  of  diffus- 

*  Akenside.  Pleasures  of  Imagination,  1st  edit.  B.  III.  615.  The  words 
in  italics  are  altered. — Ed. 


304  THE    FKIEND. 

ing  truth,  who,  uniting  the  zeal  of  the  Methodist  with  the  views 
of  the  philosopher,  should  be  personally  among  the  poor,  and 
teach  them  their  duties  in  order  that  he  may  render  them  sus 
ceptible  of  their  rights. 

"  Yet  by  what  means  can  the  lower  classes  be  made  to  learn 
their  duties,  and  urged  to  practise  them  ?  The  human  race  may 
perhaps  possess,  the  capability  of  all  excellence;  and  truth,  I 
doubt  not,  is  omnipotent  to  a  mind  already  disciplined  for  its 
reception  ;  but  assuredly  the  over- worked  laborer,  skulking  into 
an  ale-house,  is  not  likely  to  exemplify  the  one,  or  prove  the 
other.  In  that  barbarous  tumult  of  inimical  interests,  which  the 
present  state  of  society  exhibits,  religion  appears  to  offer  the  only 
means  universally  efficient.  The  perfectness  of  future  men  is 
indeed  a  benevolent  tenet,  and  may  operate  on  a  few  visionaries, 
whose  studious  habits  supply  them  with  employment,  and  seclude 
them  from  temptation.  But  a  distant  prospect,  which  we  are 
never  to  reach,  will  seldom  quicken  our  footsteps,  however  lovely 
it  may  appear  ;  and  a  blessing,  which  not  ourselves  but  posterity 
are  destined  to  enjoy,  will  scarcely  influence  the  actions  of  any — 
still  IQSS  of  the  ignorant,  the  prejudiced,  and  the  selfish. 

Preach  the  Gospel  to  the  poor.  By  its  simplicity  it  will  meet 
their  comprehension,  by  its  benevolence  soften  their  affections,  by 
its  precepts  it  will  direct  their  conduct,  by  the  vastness  of  its 
motives  insure  their  obedience.  The  situation  of  the  poor  is 
perilous  :  they  are  indeed  both 

from  within  and  from  without 
Unarmed  to  all  temptations. 

Prudential  reasonings  will  in  general  be  powerless  with  them. 
For  the  incitements  of  this  world  are  weak  in  proportion  as  we 
are  wretched  : — 

The  world  is  not  my  friend,  nor  the  world's  law. 
The  world  has  got  no  law  to  make  me  rich. 

They  too,  who  live  from  hand  to  mouth,  will  most  frequently* be 
come  improvident.  Possessing  no  stock  of  happiness,  they 
eagerly  seize  the  gratifications  of  the  moment,  and  snatch  the 
froth  from  the  wave  as  it  passes  by  them.  Nor  is  the  desolate 
state  of  their  families  a  restraining  motive,  unsoftened  as  they 
are  by  education,  and  benumbed  into  selfishness  by  the  torpedo 


ESSAY    XVI.  305 

touch  of  extreme  want.  Domestic  affections  depend  on  associa 
tion.  We  love  an  object  if,  as  often  as  we  see  or  recollect  it,  an 
agreeable  sensation  arises  in  our  rninds.  But  alas,  how  should  he 
glow  with  the  charities  of  father  and  husband,  who  gaining 
scarcely  more  than  his  own  necessities  demand,  must  have  been 
accustomed  to  regard  his  wife  and  children,  not  as  the  soothers 
of  finished  labor,  but  as  rivals  for  the  insufficient  meal  ?  In  a 
man  so  circumstanced  the  tyranny  of  the  present  can  be  over 
powered  only  by  the  tenfold  mightiness  of  the  future.  Religion 
will  cheer  his  gloom  with  her  promises,  and  by  habituating  his 
mind  to  anticipate  an  infinitely  great  revolution  hereafter,  may 
prepare  it  even  for  the  sudden  reception  of  a  less  degree  of  meli 
oration  in  this  world. 

But  if  we  hope  to  instruct  others,  AVC  should  familiarize  our 
own  minds  to  some  fixed  and  determinate  principles  of  action. 
The  world  is  a  vast  labyrinth,  in  which  almost  every  one  is  run 
ning  a  different  way,  and  almost  every  one  manifesting  hatred  to 
those  who  do  not  run  the  same  way.  A  few  indeed  stand  mo 
tionless,  and  not  seeking  to  lead  themselves  or  others  out  of  the 
maze,  laugh  at  the  failures  of  their  brethren.  Yet  with  little 
reason  :  for  more  grossly  than  the  most  bewildered  wanderer 
does  he  err,  who  never  aims  to  go  right.  It  is  more  honorable 
to  the  head,  as  well  as  to  the  heart,  to  be  misled  by  our  eagerness 
in  the  pursuit  of  truth,  than  to  be  safe  from  blundering  by  con 
tempt  of  it.  The  happiness  of  mankind  is  the  end  of  virtue,  and 
truth  is  the  knowledge  of  the  means ;  which  he  will  never  se 
riously  attempt  to  discover,  who  has  not  habitually  interested 
himself  in  the  welfare  of  others.  The  searcher  after  truth  must 
love  and  be  beloved  ;  for  general  benevolence  is  a  necessary  mo 
tive  to  constancy  of  pursuit  ;  and  this  general  benevolence  is  be 
gotten  and  rendered  permanent  by  social  and  domestic  affections. 
Let  us  beware  of 'that  proud  philosophy,  which  affects  to  inculcate 
philanthropy  while  it  denounces  every  home-born  feeling  by 
which  it  is  produced  and  nurtured.  The  paternal  and  filial  du 
ties  discipline  the  heart  and  prepare  it  for  the  love  of  all  man 
kind.  The  intensity  of  private  attachments  encourages,  not  pre 
vents,  universal  benevolence.  The  nearer  wre  approach  to  the 
sun,  the  more  intense  his  heat :  yet  what  corner  of  the  system 
does  he  not  cheer  and  vivify  ?  \  i 

The  man  who  would  find  truth,  milt  likewise  seek  it  with  a 


806  THE    FKIEND. 

humble  and  simple  heart,  otherwise  he  will  be  precipitate  and 
overlook  it ;  or  he  will  be  prejudiced,  and  refuse  to  see  it.  To 
emancipate  itself  from  the  tyranny  of  association,  is  the  most  ar 
duous  effort  of  the  mind,  particularly  in  religious  and  political 
disquisitions.  The  assertors  of  the  system  have  associated  with 
it  the  preservation  of  order  and  public  virtue  ;  the  oppugners, 
imposture  and  wars  and  rapine.  Hence,  when  they  dispute, 
each  trembles  at  the  consequences  of  the  other's  opinions  instead 
of  attending  to  his  train  of  arguments.  Of  this,  however,  we 
may  be  certain,  whether  we  be  Christians  or  infidels,  aristocrats 
or  republicans,  that  our  minds  are  in  a  state  insusceptible  of 
knowledge,  when  we  feel  an  eagerness  to  detect  the  falsehood  of 
an  adversary's  reasonings,  not  a  sincere  wish  to  discover  if  there 
be  truth  in  them ; — when  we  examine  an  argument  in  order  that 
we  may  answer  it,  instead  of  answering  because  we  have  exam 
ined  it. 

Our  opponents  are  chiefly  successful  in  confuting  the  theory  of 
freedom  by  the  practices  of  its  advocates  ;  from  our  lives  they 
draw  the  most  forcible  arguments  against  our  doctrines.  Nor 
have  they  adopted  an  unfair  mode  of  reasoning.  In  a  science 
the  evidence  suffers  neither  diminution  nor  increase  from  the  ac 
tions  of  its  professors  ;  but  the  comparative  wisdom  of  political 
systems  depends  necessarily  on  the  manners  and  capacities  of  the 
recipients.  Why  should  all  things  be  thrown  into  confusion  to 
acquire  that  liberty  which  a  faction  of  sensualists  and  gamblers 
will  neither  be  able  nor  willing  to  preserve  ? 

A  system  of  fundamental  reform  will  scarcely  be  effected  by 
massacres  mechanized  into  revolution.  "We  can  not  therefore  in 
culcate  on  the  minds  of  each  other  too  often  or  with  too  great 
earnestness  the  necessity  of  cultivating  benevolent  affections. 
We  should  be  cautious  how  we  indulge  the  feelings  even  of  vir 
tuous  indignation.  Indignation  is  the  handsome  brother  of  anger 
and  hatred.  The  temple  of  despotism,  like  that  of  Tescalipoca, 
the  Mexican  deity,  is  built  of  human  skulls,  and  cemented  with 
human  blood ; — let  us  beware  that  we  be  not  transported  into 
revenge  while  we  are  levelling  the  loathsome  pile ;  lest  when 
we  erect  the  edifice  of  freedom  we  but  vary  the  style  of  archi 
tecture,  not  change  the  materials.  Let  us  not  wantonly  offend 
even  the  prejudices  of  our  weaker  brethren,  nor  by  ill-timed  and 
vehement  declarations  of  opinion  excite  in  them  malignant  feel- 


ESSAY    XVI.  307 

ings  towards  us.  The  energies  of  the  mind  are  wasted  in  these 
intemperate  effusions.  Those  materials  of  projectile  force,  which 
now  carelessly  scattered  explode  with  an  offensive  and  useless 
noise,  directed  by  wisdom  and  union  might  heave  rocks  from 
their  base, — or  perhaps  (apart  from  the  metaphor)  might  produce 
the  desired  effect  without  the  convulsion. 

For  this  subdued  sobriety  of  temper  a  practical  faith  in  the 
doctrine  of  philosophical  necessity  seems  the  only  preparative. 
That  vice  is  the  effect  of  error  and  the  offspring  of  surrounding 
circumstances,  the  object  therefore  of  condolence  not  of  anger,  is» 
a  proposition  easily  understood,  and  as  easily  demonstrated.  But 
to  make  it  spread  from  the  understanding  to  the  affections,  to 
call  it  into  action,  not  only  in  the  great  exertions  of  patriotism, 
but  in  the  daily  and  hourly  occurrences  of  social  life,  requires  the 
most  watchful  attentions  of  the  most  energetic  mind.  It  is  not 
enough  that  we  have  once  swallowed  these  truths  : — we  must 
ieed  on  them,  as  insects  on  a  leaf,  till  the  whole  heart  be  colored 
by  their  qualities,  and  show  its  food  in  every  the  minutest  fibre.* 

Finally,  in  the  spirit  of  the  Apostle, 

Watch  ye  !  Stand  fast  in  the  principles  of  which  ye  have 
been  convinced  !  Q,uit  yourselves  like  men  !  Be  strong !  Yet 
let  all  things  be  done  in  the  spirit  of  love. 

*  I  hope  that  this  last  paragraph,  in  all  the  fulness  of  its  contrast  with 
my  present  convictions,  will  start  up  before  me  whenever  I  speak,  think, 
or  feel  intolerantly  of  persons  on  account  of  their  doctrines  and  opinions. 

30th  Oct.  1818. 


THE   SECOND  LANDING-PLACE  i 


OR  ESSAYS   INTERPOSED   FOR  AMUSEMENT,   RETROSPECT, 
AND   PREPARATION. 


MISCELLANY    THE    SECOND. 


Etiam  a  musis  si  quando  animum  paulisper  abducaimts,  apud  Musas 
ninilominus  feriamur ;  at  reclines  quidem}  at  otiosas,  at  de  his  et  illis  inter 
se  libere  colloqucntes . 


THE   SECOND  LANDING-PLACE. 


ESSAY  I. 

It  were  a  wantonness,  and  would  demand 

Severe  reproof  if  we  were  men  whose  hearts 

Could  hold  vain  dalliance  with  the  misery 

Even  of  the  dead  ;  contented  thence  to  draw 

A  momentary  pleasure,  never  mark'd 

By  reason,  barren  of  all  future  good. 

But  we  have  known  that  there  is  often  found 

In  mournful  thoughts  and  always  might  be  found 

A  power  to  vktue  friendly.  WORDSWORTH,  M.S. 

I  KNOW  riot  how  I  can  better  commence  my  second  Landing- 
Place,  as  joining  on  to  the  section  of  Politics,  than  by  the  follow 
ing  proof  of  the  severe  miseries  which  misgovernment  may  oc 
casion  in  a  country  nominally  free.  In  the  homely  ballad  of  the 
Three  Graves*  I  have  attempted  to  exemplify  the  effect,  which 
one  painful  idea,  vividly  impressed  on  the  mind  under  unusual 
circumstances,  might  have  in  producing  an  alienation  of  the 
understanding  ;  and  in  the  parts  hitherto  published,  I  have  en 
deavored  to  trace  the  progress  to  madness,  step  by  step.  But 
though  the  main  incidents  are  facts,  the  detail  of  the  circum 
stances  is  of  my  own  invention  ;  that  is,  not  what  I  knew,  but 
what  I  conceived  likely  to  have  been  the  case,  or  at  least  equiva 
lent  to  it.  In  the  tale  that  follows,  I  present  an  instance  of  the 
same  causes  acting  upon  the  mind  to  the  production  of  conduct 
as  wild  as  that  of  madness,  but  without  any  positive  or  per 
manent  loss  of  the  reason  or  the  understanding  ;  and  this  in  a 
real  occurrence,  real  in  all  its  parts  and  particulars.  But  in 
truth  this  tale  overflows  with  a  human  interest,  and  needs  no 
philosophical  deduction  to  make  it  impressive.  The  account  was 
*  Poet.  Works,  VII.  p.  \tf.-Ed. 


312  'SECOND    LANDING-PLACE. 

published  in  the  city  in  which  the  event -took  place,  and  in  the 
same  year  1  read  it,  when  I  was  in  Germany,  and  the  impression 
made  on  my  memory  was  so  deep,  that  though  I  relate  it  in  my 
own  language,  and  with  my  own  feelings,  and  in  reliance  on  the 
fidelity  of  my  recollection,  I  dare  vouch  for  the  accuracy  of  the 
narration  in  all  important  particulars. 

The  imperial  free  towns  of  Germany  are,  with  only  two  or 
three  exceptions,  enviably  distinguished  by .  the  virtuous  and 
primitive  manners  of  the  citizens,  and  by  the  parental  character 
of  their  several  governments.  As  exceptions,  however,  I  must 
mention  Aix  la  Chapelle,  poisoned  by  -French  manners,  and  the 
concourse  of  gamesters  and  sharpers  ;  and  Nuremberg,  the  in 
dustrious  and  honest  inhabitants  of  which  deserve  a  better  fate 
than  to  have  their  lives  and  properties  under  the  guardianship 
of  a  wolfish  and  merciless  oligarchy,  proud  from  ignorance,  and 
remaining  ignorant  through  pride.  It  is  from  the  small  states 
of  Germany  that  our  writers  on  political  economy  might  draw 
their  most  forcible  instances  of  actually  oppressive,  and  even 
mortal,  taxation,  and  gain  the  clearest  insight  into  the  causes 
and  circumstances  of  the  injury.  One  other  remark,  and  I  pro 
ceed  to  the  story.  I  well  remember,  that  the  event  I  am  about 
to  narrate,  called  forth,  in  several  of  the  German  periodical  pub 
lications,  the  most  passionate  (and  in  more  than  one  instance 
blasphemous)  declamations  concerning  the  incomprehensibility 
of  the  moral  government  of  the  world,  and  the  seeming  injustice 
and  cruelty  of  the  dispensations  of  Providence.  But,  assuredly, 
every  one  of  my  readers,  however  deeply  he  may  sympathize 
with  the  poor  sufferers,  will  at  once  answer  all  such  declamations 
by  the  simple  reflection,  that  no  one  of  these  awful  events  could 
possibly  have  taken  place  under  a  wise  police  and  humane  gov 
ernment,  and  that  men  have  no  right  to  complain  of  Providence 
for  evils  which  they  themselves  are  competent  to  remedy  by 
mere  common  sense,  joined  with  mere  common  humanity. 

MARIA  ELEONORA  ScnoNiNGwas  the  daughter  of  a  Nuremberg 
wire-drawer.  She  received  her  unhappy  existence  at  the  price 
of  her  mother's  life,  and  at  the  age  of  seventeen  she  followed,  as 
the  sole  mourner,  the  bier  of  her  remaining  parent.  From  her 
thirteenth  year  she  had  passed  her  life  at  her  father's  sick-bed, 
the  gout  having  deprived  him  of  the  use  of  his  limbs,  and  seen 


ESSAY    1.  313 

the  arch  of  heaven  only  when  she  went  to  fetch  food  or  medi 
cines.     The  discharge  of  her  filial  duties  occupied  the  whole  of 
her  time  and  all  her  thoughts.     She  was  his  only  nurse,  and  for 
the  last  two  years  they  lived  without  a  servant.     She  prepared 
his  scanty  meal,  she  bathed  his  aching  limbs,  and  though  weak 
and  delicate  from  constant  confinement  and  the  poison  of  melan 
choly  thoughts,  she  had  acquired  an  unusual  power  in  her  arms, 
from  the  habit  of  lifting  her  old  and  suffering  father  out  of  and 
into  his  bed  of  pain.     Thus  passed  away  her  early  youth  in  sor 
row  :  she  grew  up   in   tears,  a  stranger  to  the  amusements  of 
youth,  and  its  more  'delightful  schemes  and  imaginations.     She 
was  not,  however,  unhappy  :  she  attributed,  indeed,  no  merit  to 
herself  for  her  virtues,  but  for  that  reason  were  they  the  more  her 
reward.     The  peace  ichich  passetli  all  understanding  disclosed 
itself  in  all  her  looks  and  movements.     It  lay  on  her  countenance, 
like  a  steady  unshadowed  moonlight :  and  her  voice,  which,  was 
naturally  at  once  sweet  and  subtle,  came  from  her,  like  the  fine 
flute-tones  of  a  masterly  performer,  which  still  floating  at  some 
uncertain  distance,  seem  to  be  created  by  the  player,  rather  than 
to  proceed  from  the  instrument.     If  you  had  listened  to  it  in  one 
of  those  brief  sabbaths  of  the  soul,  when  the  activity  and  discur 
siveness  of  the  thoughts   are   suspended,   and   the  mind  quietly 
eddies  round,  instead  of  flowing  onward — (as  at  late  evening  in 
the  spring  I  have  seen  a  bat  wheel  in  silent  circles  round  and 
round  a  fruit-tree  in  full  blossom,  in  the- midst  of  which,  as  within 
a  close  tent  of  the  purest  white,  an  unseen  nightingale  was  piping 
its  sweetest  notes) — in  such  a  mood  you  might  have  half-fancied, 
half-felt,  that  her  voice  had  a  separate  being  of  its  own — that  it 
was  a  living  something,  the  mode  of  existence  of  which  was  for 
the  ear  only  :  so  deep  was  her  resignation,  so  entirely  had  it  be 
come  the  unconscious  habit  of  her  nature,  and  in  all  she  did  or 
said,  so  perfectly  were  both  her  movements  and  her  utterance 
without  effort,  and  without  the  appearance  of  effort !     Her  dying 
father's  last  words,  addressed  to  the   clergyman  who  attended 
him,  were  his  grateful  testimony,  that  during  his  long  and  sore 
trial  his  good  Maria  had  behaved  to  him  like  an  angel ; — that 
the  most  disagreeable  offices  and  the  least  suited  to  her  age  and 
sex,   had    never  drawn  an  unwilling  look   from  her,   and   that 
whenever  his  eye  had  met  hers,  he  had  been  sure  to  see  in  it 
either  the  tear  of  pity  or  the  sudden  smile  expressive  of  her  aflec- 
roL.  TI.  O 


314  SECOND    LANDING-PLACE. 

tion  and  wish  to  cheer  him.  God  (said  he)  will  reward  the  good 
girl  for  all  her  long  dutifuliiess  to  me  !  He  departed  during  the 
inward  prayer,  which  followed  these  his  last  words.  His  wish 
will  be  fulfilled  in  eternity  ;  but  for  this  world  the  prayer  of  the 
dying  man  was  not  heard. 

Maria  sat  and  wept  by  the  grave,  which  now  contained  her 
father,  her  friend,  the  only  bond  by  which  she  was  linked  to  life. 
But  while  yet  the  last  sound  of  his  death-bell  was  murmuring 
away  in  the  air,  she  was  obliged  to  return  with  two  revenue 
officers,  who  demanded  entrance  into  the  house,  in  order  to  take 
possession  of  the  papers  of  the  deceased,  and  from  them  to  dis 
cover  whether  he  had  always  given  in  his  income,  and  paid  the 
yearly  income-tax  according  to  his  oath,  and  in  proportion  to  his 
property.*  After  the  few  documents  had  been  looked  through 
and  collated  with  the  registers,  the  officers  found,  or  pretended  to 
find,  sufficient  proofs,  that  the  deceased  had  not  paid  his  tax  pro- 
portioriably,  which  imposed  on  them  the  duty  to  put  all  the 
effects  under  lock  and  seal.  They  therefore  desired  the  maiden 
to  retire  to  an  empty  room,  till  the  Ransom  Office  had  decided  on 
the  affair.  Bred  up  in  suffering,  and  habituated  to  immediate 
compliance,  the  affrighted  and  weeping  maiden  obeyed  She 
hastened  to  the  empty  garret,  while  the  revenue  officers  placed 
the  lock  and  seal  upon  the  other  doors,  and  finally  took  away  the 
papers  to  the  Ransom  Office. 

Not  before  evening  did  the  poor  faint  Maria,  exhausted  with 
weeping,  rouse  herself  with  the  intention  of  going  to  her  bed  ; 
but  she  found  the  door  of  her  chamber  sealed  up  and  that  she 

*  This  tax  called  the  Losung  or  ransom,  in  Nuremberg,  -was  at  first  a 
voluntary  contribution :  every  one  gave  according  to  his  liking  or  circum 
stances.  But  in  the  beginning  of  the  1 5th  century  the  heavy  contributions 
levied  for  the  service  of  the  Empire  forced  the  magistrates  to  determine  the 
proportions  and  make  the  payment  compulsory.  Every  citizen  must  yearly 
take  what  is  called  his  ransom  oath  (Losungseid)  that  the  sum  paid  by  him 
has  been  in  the  strict  determinate  proportion  to  his  property.  On  the 
death  of  any  citizen,  the  Ransom  Office,  or  commissioners  for  this  income  or 
property  tax,  possess  the  right  to  examine  his  books  and  papers,  and  to 
compare  his  yearly  payment  as  found  in  their  registers  with  the  property 
he  appears  to  have  possessed  during  that  time.  If  any  disproportion  is 
detected,  if  the  yearly  declarations  of  the  deceased  should  have  been  inac 
curate  in  the  least  degree,  his  whole  effects  are  confiscated,  and  though  he 
should  have  left  wife  and  child,  the  state  treasury  becomes  his  heir 


ESSAY    I.  815 

must  pass  the  night  on  the  floor  of  the  garret.  The  officers  had 
had  the  humanity  to  place  at  the  door  the  small  portion  of  food 
that  happened  to  be  in  the  house.  Thus  passed  several  days,  till 
the  officers  returned  with  an  order  that  Maria  Eleonora  Schoning- 
should  leave  the  house  without  delay,  the  commission  court  hav 
ing  confiscated  the  whole  property  to  the  city  treasury.  The 
father  before  he  was  bedridden  had  never  possessed  any  consider 
able  property  ;  but  yet,  by  his  industry,  had  been  able  not  only 
to  keep  himself  free  from  debt,  but  to  lay  up  a  small  sum  for  the 
evil  day.  Three  years  of  evil  datys,  three  whole  years  of  sickness, 
had  consumed  the  greatest  part  of  this ;  yet  still  enough  re 
mained  not  only  to  defend  his  daughter  from  immediate  want, 
but  likewise  to  maintain  her  till  she  could  get  into  some  service 
or  employment,  and  should  have  recovered  her  spirits  sufficiently 
to  bear  up  against  the  hardships  of  life.  With  this  thought  her 
dying  father  comforted  himself,  and  this  hope  too  proved  vain. 

A  timid  girl,  whose  past  life  had  been  made  up  of  sorrow  and 
privation,  she  went  indeed  to  solicit  the  commissioners  in  her  own 
behalf;  but  these  were,  as  is  mostly  the  case  on  the  continent, 
advocates — the  most  hateful  class,  perhaps,  of  human  society, 
hardened  by  the  frequent  sight  of  misery,  and  seldom  superior  in 
moral  character  to  English  pettifoggers  or  Old  Bailey  Atcorneys. 
She  went  to  them,  indeed,  but  not  a  word  could  she  say  for  her 
self.  Her  tears  and  inarticulate  sounds — for  these  her  judges  had 
no  ears  or  eyes.  Mute  and  confounded,  like  an  unfledged  dove 
fallen  out  from  its  mother's  nest,  Maria  betook  herself  to  her 
home,  and  found  the  house  door  too  now  shut  upon  her.  Her 
whole  wealth  consisted  in  the  clothes  she  wore.  She  had  no  re 
lations  to  whom  she  could  apply,  for  those  of  her  mother  had  dis 
claimed  all  acquaintance  with  her,  and  her  father  was  a  Nether 
Saxon  by  birth.  She  had  no  acquaintance,  for  all  the  friends  of 
old  Schoning  had  forsaken  him  in  the  first  year  of  his  sickness. 
She  had  no  play-fellow,  for  who  was  likely  to  have  been  the 
companion  of  a  nurse  in  the  room  of  a  sick  man  ?  Surely,  since 
the  creation  never  was  a  human  being  more  solitary  and  forsaken 
than  this  innocent  poor  creature,  that  now  roamed  about  friend 
less  in  a  populous  city,  to  the  whole  of  whose  inhabitants  her 
filial  tenderness,  her  patient  domestic  goodness,  and  all  her  soft 
yet  difficult  virtues,  might  well  have  been  the  model  : — 


816  SECOND    LANDING-PLACE. 

But  homeless  near  a  thousand  homes  she  stood, 
And  near  a  thousand  tables  pin'd  and  wanted  food  !* 

The  night  came,  and  Maria  knew  not  where  to  find  a  shelter. 
She  tottered  to  the  church-yard  of  St.  James'  church  in  Nurem 
berg,  where  the  hody  of  her  father  rested.  Upon  the  yet  grassless 
grave  she  threw  herself  down  ;  and  could  anguish  have  pre 
vailed  over  youth,  that  night  she  had  been  in  heaven.  The  day 
came,  and  like  a  guilty  thing,  this  guiltless,  this  good  being,  stole 
away  from  the  crowd  that  began^o  pass  through  the  church-yard, 
and  hastening  through  the  streets  to  the  city  gate,  she  hid  herself 
behind  a  garden  hedge  just  beyond  it,  and  there  wept  away  the 
second  day  of  her  desolation.  The  evening  closed  in  :  the  pang 
of  hunger  made  itself  felt  amid  the  dull  aching  of  self- wearied 
anguish,  and  drove  the  sufferer  back  again  into  the  city.  Yet 
what  could  she  gain  there  ?  She  had  not  the  courage  to  beg,  and 
the  very  thought  of  stealing  never  occurred  to  her  innocent  mind. 
Scarce  conscious  whither  she  was  going,  or  why  she  went,  she 
found  herself  once  more  by  her  father's  grave,  as  the  last  relic  of 
evening  faded  away  .in  the  horizon. 

I  have  sat  for  some  minutes  with  my  pen  resting  :  I  can  scarce 
summon  the  courage  to  tell,  what  I  scarce  know  whether  I  ought 
to  tell.  Were  I  composing  a  tale  of  fiction,  the  reader  might 
justly  suspect  the  purity  of  my  own  heart,  and  most  certainly 
would  have  abundant  right  to  resent  such  an  incident,  as  an  out 
rage  wantonly  offered  to  his  imagination.  As  I  think  of  the  cir 
cumstance,  it  seems  more  like  a  distempered  dream  :  but  alas  ! 
what  is  guilt  so  detestable  other  than  a  dream  of  madness,  that 
worst  madness,  the  madness  of  the  heart  ?  I.  can  not  but  believe, 
that  the  dark  and  restless  passions  must  first  have  drawn  the 
mind  in  upon  themselves,  and,  as  wi^th  the  confusion  of  imper 
fect  sleep,  have  in  some  strange  manner  taken  away  the  sense  of 
reality,  in  order  to  render  it  possible  for  a  human  being  to  perpe 
trate  what  it  is  too  certain  that  human  beings  have  perpetrated. 
The  church-yards  in  most  of  the  German  cities,  and  too  often,  1 
fear,  in  those  of  our  own  country,  are  not  more  injurious  to  health 
than  to  mortality.  Their  former  venerable  character  is  no  more. 
The  religion  of  the  place  has  followed  its  superstitions,  and  their 
darkness  and  loneliness  tempt  worse  spirits  to  roam  in  them  than 

*  "Wordsworth's  Female  Vagi-ant. — Ed. 


ESSAY    1.  317 

those  whose  nightly  wanderings  appalled  the  believing  hearts  of 
our  brave  forefathers.  It  Avas  close  by  the  new-made  grave  of  her 
father  that  the  meek  and  spotless  daughter  became  the  victim  to 
brutal  violence,  which  weeping,  and  watching,  and  cold,  and 
hunger  had  rendered  her  utterly  unable  to* resist.  The  monster 
left  her  in  a  trance  of  stupefaction,  and  into  her  right  hand,  which 
she  had  clenched  convulsively,  he  had  forced  a  half-dollar. 

It  was  one  of  the  darkest  nights  of  autumn ;  in  the  deep  and 
dead  silence  the  only  sounds  audible  were  the  slow  blunt  ticking 
of  the  church  clock,  and  now  arid  then  the  sinking  down  of  bones 
in  the  nigh  charnel  house.  Maria,  when  she  had  in  some  de 
gree  recovered  her  senses,  sate  upon  the  grave  near  which — not 
her  innocence  had  been  sacrificed,  but — that  which,  from  the  fre 
quent  admonitions  and  almost  the  dying  words  of  her  father,  she 
had  been  accustomed  to  consider  as  such.  Guiltless,  she  felt  the 
pangs  of  guilt,  and  still  continued  to  grasp  the  coin  which  the 
monster  had  left  in  her  hand,  with  an  anguish  as  sore  as  if  it  had 
been  indeed  the  wages  of  voluntary  prostitution.  Giddy  and  faint 
from  want  of  food,  her  brain  becoming  feverish  from  sleeplessness, 
and  this  unexampled  concurrence  of  calamities,  this  complication 
and  entanglement  of  misery  in  misery,  she  imagined  that  she 
heard  her  father's  voice  bidding  her  leave  his  sight.  His  last 
blessings  had  been  conditional,  for  in  his  last  hours  he  had  told 
her,  that  the  loss  of  her  innocence  would  not  let  him  rest  quiet  in 
his  grave.  His  last  blessings  now  sounded  in  her  ears  like  curses, 
and  she  fled  from  the  church-yard  as  if  a  demon  had  been  chasing 
her  ;  and  hurrying  along  the  streets,  through  which  it  is  probable 
her  accursed  violator  had  walked  with  quiet  and  orderly  step5*  to 

*It  must  surely  liave  been  after  hearing  of  or  witnessing  some  similar 
event  or  scene  of  wretchedness,  that  the  most  eloquent  of  our  Avriters  (I  had 
almost  said  of  our  poets,)  Jeremy  Taylor,  wrote  the  following  paragraph, 
•which  at  least  in  Longinus's  sense  of  the  word,  we  may  place  among  the 
moot  sublime  passages  in  English  literature.  "  He  that  is  no  fool,  but  can 
consider  wisely,  if  he  be  in  love  with  this  world,  we  need  not  despair  but 
that  a  witty  man  might  reconcile  him  with  tortures,  and  make  him  think 
charitably  of  the  rack,  and  be  brought  to  admire  the  harmony  that  is  made 
by  a  herd  of  evening  wolves  when  they  miss  their  draught  of  blood  in  their 
midnight  revels.  The  groans  of  a  man  in  a  fit  of  the  stone  are  worse  than 
all  these ;  and  the  distractions  of  a  troubled  conscience  are  worse  than  those 
groans  :  and  vet  a  careless  merry  sinner  is  worse  than  all  that.  But  if  we 
could  from  one  of  the  battlements  of  heaven  espy,  how  many  men  and  women 


818  SECOND    LANDING-PLACE. 

his  place  of  rest  and  security,  she  was  seized  by  the  watchmen  of 
the  night — a  welcome  prey,  as  they  receive  in  Nuremberg  a  re 
ward  from  the  police  chest,  for  every  woman  they  find  in  the 
streets  after  ten  o'clock  at  night.  It  was  midnight,  and  she  was 
taken  to  the  next  watch-house. 

The  sitting  magistrate,  before  whom  she  was  carried  the  next 
morning,  prefaced  his  first  question  with  the  most  opprobrious 
title  that  ever  belonged  to  the  most  hardened  street-walkers,  and 
which  man  born  of  woman  should  not  address  even  to  these, 
were  it  but  for  his  own  sake.  The  frightful  name  awakened 
the  poor  orphan  from  her  dream  of  guilt,  it  brought  back  the 
consciousness  of  her  innocence,  but  with  it  the  sense  likewise  of 
her  wrongs  and  of  her  helplessness.  The  cold  hand  of  death 
seemed  to  grasp  her,  she  fainted  dead  away  at  his  feet,  and  was 
not  without  difficulty  recovered.  The  magistrate  was  so  far 
softened,  and  only  so  far,  as  to  dismiss  her  for  the  present  ;  but 
with  a  menace  of  sending  her  to  the  House  of  Correction  if  she 
were  brought  before  him  a  second  time.  The  idea  of  her  own 
innocence  now  became  uppermost  in  her  mind  ;  but  mingling  with 
the  thought  of  her  utter  forlornness,  and  the  image  of  her  angry- 
father,  and,  doubtless  still  in  a  state  of  bewilderment,  she  formed 
the  resolution  of  drowning  herself  in  the  river  Pegnitz — in  order 
(for  this  was  the  shape  which  her  fancy  had  taken)  to  throw 
herself  at  her  father's  feet,  and  to  justify  her  innocence  to  him, 
in  the  world  of  spirits.  She  hoped,  that  her  father  would  speak 
for  her  to  the  Saviour,  and  that  she  should  be  forgiven.  But  as 
she  was  passing  through  the  suburb,  she  was  met  by  a  soldier's 
wife,  who  during  the  life-time  of  her  father  had  been  occasion 
ally  employed  in  the  house  as  a  chare-woman.  This  poor  wo 
man  was  startled  at  the  disordered  apparel,  and  more  disordered 

at  this  time  lie  fainting  and  dying  for  want  of  bread,  how  many  young  men 
are  hewn  down  by  the  sword  of  war ;  how  many  poor  orphans  are  now 
weeping  over  the  graves  of  their  father,  by  whose  life  they  were  enabled  to 
eat ;  if  we  could  but  hear  how  many  mariners  and  passengers  are  at  this 
present  in  a  storm,  and  shriek  out  because  their  keel  dashes  against  a  rock, 
or  bulges  under  them ;  how  many  people  there  are  that  weep  with  want, 
and  are  mad  with  oppression,  or  are  desperate  by  a  too  quick  sense  of  a  con 
stant  infelicity ;  in  all  reason  we  should  be  glad  to  be  out  of  the  noise  and 
participation  of  so  many  evils.  This  is  a  place  of  sorrows  and  tears,  of 
great  evils  and  constant  calamities :  let  us  remove  hence,  at  least  in  affec 
tions  and  preparations  of  mind."  Holy  Dying,  ch.  i.  s.  5,  with  omissions. — Ed. 


ESSAY    I.  319 

looks  of  her  young  mistress,  and  questioned  her  with  such  an 
anxious  and  heart-felt  tenderness,  as  at  once  brought  back  the 
poor  orphan  to  her  natural  feelings  and  the  obligations  of  reli 
gion.  As  a  frightened  child  throws  itself  into  the  arms  of  its 
mother,  and  hiding  its  head  on  her  breast,  half  tells  amid  sobs 
what  has  happened  to  it,  so  did  she  throw  herself  on  the  neck 
of  the  woman  who  had  uttered  the  first  words  of  kindness  to  her 
since  her  father's  death,  and  with  loud  weeping  she  related  what 
she  had  endured  and  what  she  was  about  to  have  done,  told 
her  all  her  affliction,  and  her  misery,  the  wormwood  and  the  gall. 
Her  kind-hearted  friend  mingled  tears  with  tears,  pressed  the  poor 
forsaken  one  to  her  heart ;  comforted  her  with  sentences  out  of 
the  hymn-book  ;  and  with  the  most  affectionate  entreaties  con 
jured  her  to  give  up  her  horrid  purpose,  for  that  life  was  short, 
and  heaven  was  forever. 

Maria  had  been  bred  up  in  the  fear  of  God  ;  she  now  trem 
bled  at  the  thought  of  her  former  purpose,  and  followed  her  friend 
Haiiin,  for  that  was  the  name  of  her  guardian  angel,  to  her 
home  hard  by.  The  moment  she  entered  the  door,  she  sank 
down  and  lay  at  her  full  length,  as  if  only  to  be  motionless  in  a 
place  of  shelter  had  been  the  fulness  of  delight.  As  when  a 
withered  leaf  that  has  been  long  whirled  about  by  the  gusts  of 
autumn,  is  blown  into  a  cave  or  hollow  tree,  it  stops  suddenly, 
and  all  at  once  looks  the  very  image  of  quiet — such  might  this 
poor  orphan  appear  to  the  eye  of  a  meditative  imagination. 

A  place  of  shelter  she  had  attained,  and  a  friend  willing  to 
comfort  her  in  all  that  she  could  :  but  the  noble-hearted  Haiiin 
was  herself  a  daughter  of  calamity,  one  who  from  year  to  year 
must  lie  down  in  weariness  and  rise  up  to  labor  ;  for  whom  this 
world  provides  no  other  comfort  but  the  sleep  which  enables 
them  to  forget  it ;  no  other  physician  but  death,  which  takes 
them  out  of  it.  She  was  married  to  one  of  the  city  guards,  who, 
like  Maria's  father,  had  been  long  sick  and  bed-ridden.  Him, 
herself,  and  two  little  children,  she  had  to  maintaia  by  washing 
and  charing  ;*  and  some  time  after  Maria  had  been  domesticated 
with  them,  Haiiin  told  her  that  she  herself  had  been  once  driven 
to  a  desperate  thought  by  the  cry  of  her  hungry  children,  during 

*  I  am  ignorant,  whether  there  be  any  classical  authority  for  this  word ; 
but  I  know  no  other  word  that  expresses  occasional  day -labor  in  the  housea 
of  others. 


320  SKCOND    LANDING-FLACK 

a  want  of  employment,  and  that  she  had  been  on  the  point  of 
killing  one  of  the  little  ones,  and  of  then  surrendering  herself 
into  the  hands  of  justice.  In  this  manner,  she  had  conceived, 
all  would  be  well  provided  for  ;  the  surviving  child  would  be 
admitted,  as  a  matter  of  course,  into  the  Orphan  House,  and  her 
husband  into  the  Hospital  ;  while  she  herself  would  have  atoned 
tor  her  act  by  a  public  execution,  and  together  with  the  child 
that  she  had  destroyed,  would  have  passed  into  a  state  of  bliss. 
All  this  she  related  to  Maria,  and  those  tragic  thoughts  left  but 
too  deep  and  lasting  impression  on  her  mind.  Weeks  after,  she 
herself  renewed  the  conversation,  by  expressing  to  her  benefactress 
her  inability  to  conceive  how  it  was  possible  ibr  one  human  being 
to  take  away  the  life  of  another,  especially  that  of  an  innocent 
little  child.  "  For  that  reason,"  replied  Harlin,  "  because  it  was 
so  innocent  and  so  good,  I  wished  to  put  it  out  of  this  wicked 
world.  Thinkest  thou  then,  that  I  would  have  my  head  cut  off 
for  the  sake  of  a  wicked  child  ?  Therefore  it  was  little  Nan, 
that  I  meant  to  have  taken  with  me,  who,  as  you  see,  is  always 
so  sweet  and  patient  ;  little  Frank  has  already  his  humors  and 
naughty  tricks,  and  suits  better  for  this  world."  This  was  the 
answer.  Maria  brooded  awhile  over  it  in  silence,  then  passion 
ately  snatched  the  children  up  in  her  arms,  as  if  she  would  pro 
tect  them  against  their  own  mother. 

For  one  whole  year  the  orphan  lived  with  the  soldier's  wife, 
and  by  their  joint  labors  barely  kept  off  absolute  want.  As  a 
little  boy  (almost  a  child  in  size,  though  in  his  thirteenth  year) 
once  told  me  of  himself,  as  he  was  guiding  me  up  the  Brocken, 
in  the  Hartz  Forest,  they  had  but  "  little  of  that,  of  which  a  great 
deal  tells  but  for  little."  But  now  came  the  second  winter,  and 
with  it  came  bad  times,  a  season  of  trouble  for  this  poor  and 
meritorious  household.  The  wife  now  fell  sick  :  too  constant 
and  too  hard  labor,  too  scanty  and  too  innutritious  food,  had 
gradually  wasted  away  her  strength.  Maria  redoubled  her  ef 
forts  in  order,  to  provide  bread  and  fuel  for  their  washing  which 
they  took  in ;  but  the  task  was  above  her  powers.  Besides,  she 
was  so  timid  and  so  agitated  at  the  sight  of  strangers,  that  some 
times,  with  the  best  good- will,  she  was  left  without  employment. 
One  by  one,  every  article  of  the  least  value  which  they  possessed 
was  sold  off,  except  the  bed  on  which  the  husband  lay.  He  died 
just  before  the  approach  of  spring ;  but  about  the  same  time  the 


ESSAY    I.  821 

wife  gave  signs  of  convalescence.  The  physician,  though  almost 
as  poor  as  his  patients,  had  been  kind  to  them  :  silver  and  gold 
had  he  none,  but  he  occasionally  brought  a  little  wine,  and  often 
assured  them  that  nothing  was  wanting  to  her  perfect  recovery, 
but  better  nourishment  and  a  little  wine  every  day.  This,  how 
ever,  could  not  be  regularly  procured,  and  Harlin's  spirits  sank, 
and  as  her  bodily  pain  left  her  she  became  more  melancholy, 
silent,  and  self-involved.  And  now  it  was  that  Maria's  mind 
was  incessantly  racked  by  the  frightful  apprehension,  that  hei 
friend  might  be  again  meditating  the  accomplishment  of  her  for 
mer  purpose.  IShe  had  grown  as  passionately  fond  of  the  two  chil 
dren  as  if  she  had  borne  them  under  her  own  heart ;  but  the 
jeopardy  in  which  she  conceived  her  friend's  salvation  to  stand 
— this  was  her  predominant  thought.  For  all  the  hopes  and 
fears,  which  under  a  happier  lot  would  have  been  associated 
with  the  objects  of  the  senses,  were  transferred,  by  Maria,  to  her 
notions  and  images  of  a  future  state. 

In  the  beginning  of  March,  one  bitter  cold  evening,  Maria 
started  up  and  suddenly  left  the  house.  The  last  morsel  of  food 
had  been  divided  betwixt  the  two  children  for  their  breakfast : 
and  for  the  last  hour  or  more  the  little  boy  had  been  crying  for 
hunger,  while  his  gentler  sister  had  been  hiding  her  face  in 
Maria's  lap,  and  pressing  her  little  body  against  her  knees,  in 
order  by  that  mechanic  pressure  to  dull  the  aching  from  empti 
ness.  The  tender-hearted  and  visionary  maiden  had  watched 
the  mother's  eye,  and  had  interpreted  several  of  her  sad  and 
steady  looks  according  to*  her  preconceived  apprehensions.  She 
had  conceived  all  at  once  the  strange  and  enthusiastic  thought, 
that  she  would  in  some  way  or  other  offer  her  own  soul  for  the 
salvation  of  the  soul  of  her  friend.  The  money,  which  had  been 
left  in  her  hand,  flashed  upon  the  eye  of  her  mind,  as  a  single 
unconnected  image  :  and  faint  with  hunger  and  shivering  with 
cold,  she  sallied  forth — in  search  of  guilt !  Awful  are  the  dis 
pensations  of  the  Supreme,  and  in  his  severest  judgments  the 
hand  of  mercy  is  visible.  It  was  a  night  so  wild  with  wind  and 
rain,  or  rather  rain  and  snow  mixed  together,  that  a  famished 
wolf  would  have  stayed  in  his  cave,  and  listened  to  a  howl  more 
fearful  than  his  own.  Forlorn  Maria  !  thou  wast  kneeling  in 
pious  simplicity  at  the  grave  of  thy  father,  and  thou  becamest 
the  prey  of  a  monster.  Innocent  thou  wast  and  without  guilt 


822  SECOND    LANDING-PLACE. 

didst  thou  remain.  Now  thou  goest  forth  of  thy  own  accord  ; — 
but  God  will  have  pity  on  thee.  Poor  bewildered  innocent !  In 
thy  spotless  imagination  dwelt  no  distinct  conception  of  the  evil 
which  thou  wentest  forth  to  brave.  To  save  the  soul  of  thy 
friend  was  the  dream  of  thy  feverish  brain,  and  thou  wast  again 
apprehended  as  an  outcast  of  shameless  sensuality,  at  the  moment 
when  thy  too  spiritualized  fancy  was  busied  with  the  glorified 
forms  of  thy  friend  and  her  little  ones  interceding  for  thee  at  the 
throne  of  the  Redeemer  ! 

At  this  moment  her  perturbed  fancy  suddenly  suggested  to  her 
a  new  mean  for  the  accomplishment  of  her  purpose  :  and  she 
replied  to  the  night-watch,  who  with  a  brutal  laugh  bade  her 
expect  on  the  morrow  the  unmanly  punishment,  which  to  the 
disgrace  of  human  nature  the  laws  of  some  Protestant  states  in 
flict  on  female  vagrants,  that  she  came  to  deliver  herself  up  as 
an  infanticide.  She  was  instantly  taken  before  the  magistrate 
through  as  wild  and  pitiless  a  storm  as  ever  pelted  on  a  houseless 
head, — through  as  black  and  tyrannous  a  night  as  ever  aided  the 
workings  of  a  heated  brain.  Here  she  confessed  that  she  had 
been  delivered  of  an  infant  by  the  soldier's  wife,  Harlin,  that  she 
deprived  it  of  life  in  the  presence  of  Harlin,  and  according  to  a 
plan  preconcerted  with  her,  and  that  Harlin  had  buried  it  some 
where  in  the  wood,  but  where  she  knew  not.  During  this 
strange  tale,  she  appeared  to  listen  with  a  mixture  of  fear  and 
satisfaction  to  the  howling  of  the  wind  ;  and  never  sure  could  a 
confession  of  real  guilt  have  been  accompanied  by  a  more  dread 
fully  appropriate,  music.  At  the  moment  of  her  apprehension 
she  had  formed  the  scheme  of  helping  her  friend  out  of  the 
world  in  a  state  of  innocence.  When  the  soldier's  widow  was 
confronted  with  the  orphan,  and  the  latter  had  repeated  her  con 
fession  to  her  face,  Harlin  answered  in  these  words,  "  For  God's 
sake,  Maria  !  how  have  I  deserved  this  of  thee  ?"  Then  turning 
to  the  magistrate  said,  "  I  know  nothing  of  this."  This  was  the 
sole  answer  which  she  gave,  and  not  another  word  could  they 
extort  from  her.  The  instruments  of  torture  were  brought,  arid 
Harlin  was  warned,  that  if  she  did  not  confess  of  her  own  accord, 
the  truth  would  be  immediately  forced  from  her.  This  menace 
convulsed  Maria  SchOning  with  aflright ;  her  intention  had  been 
to  emancipate  herself  and  her  friend  from  a  life  of  unmixed  suf 
fering,  without  the  crime  of  suicide  in  either,  arid  with  no  guilt 


ESSAY    I.  323 

at  all  on  the  part  of  her  friend.  The  thought  of  her  friend's 
being  put  to  the  torture  had  not  occurred  to  her.  Wildly  and 
eagerly  she  pressed  her  friend's  hands,  already  bound  in  prepara 
tion  for  the  torture  ; — she  pressed  them  in  agony  between  her 
own,  and  said  to  her,  "  Anna,  confess  it !  Anna,  dear  Anna  !  it 
will  then  be  well  with  all  of  us  !  all,  all  of  us  !  and  Frank  and 
little  Nan  will  be  put  into  the  Orphan  House !"  Maria's  scheme 
now  passed,  like  a  flash  of  lightning,  through  the  widow's  mind ; 
she  acceded  to  it  at  once,  kissed  Maria  repeatedly,  and  then 
serenely  turning  her  face  to  the  judge,  acknowledged  that  she 
had  added  to  the  guilt  by  so  obstinate  a  denial,  that  all  her 
friend  had  said  was  true,  save  only  that  she  had  thrown  the  dead 
infant  into  the  river,  and  not  buried  it  in  the  wood. 

They  wore  both  committed  to  prison,  and  as  they  both  perse 
vered  in  their  common  confession,  the  process  was  soon  made  out 
and  the  condemnation  followed  the  trial :  and  the  sentence,  by 
which  they  were  both  to  be  beheaded  with  the  sword,  was  or 
dered  to  be  put  in  force  on  the  next  day  but  one.  On  the  morn 
ing  of  the  execution,  the  delinquents  were  brought  together,  in 
order  that  they  might  be  reconciled  with  each  other,  and  join  in 
common  prayer  for  forgiveness  of  their  common  guilt. 

But  now  Maria's  thoughts  took  another  turn.  The  idea  that 
her  benefactress,  that  so  very  good  a  woman,  should  be  violently 
put  out  of  life,  and  this  with  an  infamy  on  her  name  which 
would  cling  forever  to  the  little  orphans,  overpowered  her..  Her 
own  excessive  desire  to  die  scarcely  prevented  her  from  discover 
ing  the  whole  plan ;  and  when  Harlin  was  left  alone  with  her, 
and  she  saw  her  friend's  calm  and  affectionate  look,  her  fortitude 
was  dissolved  :  she  burst  into  loud  and  passionate  weeping,  and 
throwing  herself  into  her  friend's  arms,  with  convulsive  sobs  she 
entreated  her  forgiveness.  Harlin  pressed  the  poor  agonized  girl 
to  her  arms  ;  like  a  tender  mother,  she  kissed  and  fondled  her 
wet  cheeks,  and  in  the  most  solemn  and  emphatic  tones  assured 
her  that  there  was  nothing  to  forgive.  On  the  contrary,  she  was 
her  greatest  benefactress  and  the  instrument  of  God's  goodness  to 
remove  her  at  once  from  a  miserable  world  and  from  the  temp 
tation  of  committing  a  heavy  crime.  In  vain.  Her  repeated 
promises,  that  she  would  answer  before  God  for  them  both,  could 
not  pacify  the  tortured  conscience  of  Maria,  till  at  length  the 
presence  of  the  clergyman  and  the  preparations  for  receiving  the 


324  SECOND    LANDING-FLAG'^. 

sacrament  occasioning  the  widow  to  address  her  thus — "  See, 
Maria  !  this  is  the  body  and  blood  of  Christ,  which  takes  away 
all  sin  !  Let  us  partake  together  of  this  holy  repast  with  full 
trust  in  God  and  joyful  hope  of  our  approaching  happiness." 
These  words  of  comfort,  uttered  with  cheering  tones,  and  accom 
panied  with  a  look  of  inexpressible  tenderness  and  serenity, 
brought  back  peace  for  a  while  to  her  troubled  spirit.  They 
communicated  together,  and  on  parting,  the  magnanimous  wo 
man  once  more  embraced  her  young  friend  :  then  stretching  her 
ha*iid  toward  heaven,  said,  "  Be  tranquil,  Maria  !  by  to-morrow 
morning  we  are  there,  and  all  our  sorrows  stay  here  behind  us." 
I  hasten  to  the  scene  of  the  execution  :  for  I  anticipate  my 
reader's  feelings  in  the  exhaustion  of  my  own  heart.  Serene  and 
with  unaltered  countenance  the  lofty-minded  Harlin  heard  the 
strokes  of  the  death-bell,  stood  before  the  scaffold  while  the  stafF 
was  broken  over  her,  and  at  length  ascended  the  steps,  all  with  a 
steadiness  and  tranquillity  of  manner  which  was  not  more  distant' 
from  fear  than  from  defiance  and  bravado.  Altogether  different 
was  the  state  of  poor  Maria  :  wdtli  shattered  nerves  and  an  ago 
nizing  conscience  that  incessantly  accused  her  as  the  murderess 
of  her  friend,  she  did  not  walk  but  staggered  towards  the  scaf 
fold  and  stumbled  up  the  steps.  While  Harlin,  who  went  first, 
at  every  step  turned  her  head  round  and  still  whispered  to  her, 
raising  her  eyes  to  heaven. — "  But  a  few  minutes,  Maria  !  and 
we  are  there  !"  On  the  scafibld  she  again  bade  her  farewell, 
again  repeating,  "  Dear  Maria  !  but  one  minute  now,  and  we  are 
together  writh  God."  But  when  she  knelt  down  and  her  neck 
was  bared  for  the  stroke,  the  unhappy  girl  lost  all  self-command, 
and  with  a  loud  and  piercing  shriek  she  bade  them  hold  and  not 
murder  the  innocent.  "  She  is  innocent !  I  have  borne  false 
witness  !  I  alone  am  the  murderess  !"  She  rolled  herself  now 
at  the  feet  of  the  executioner,  and  now  at  those  of  the  clergymen, 
and  conjured  them  to  stop  the  execution,  declaring  that  the 
whole  story  had  been  invented  by  herself;  that  she  had  never 
brought  forth,  much  less  destroyed  an  infant ;  that  for  her 
friend's  sake  she  made  this  discoveiy ;  that  for  herself  she 
wished  to  die,  and  would  die  gladly,  if  they  would  take  away 
her  friend,  and  promise  to  free  her  soul  from  the  dreadful  agony 
of  having  murdered  her  friend  by  false  witness.  The  executioner 
asked  Harlin,  if  there  were  any  truth  in  what  Maria  Sehdning 


KSSAY    J.  335 

had  said.  The  heroine  answered  with  manifest  reluctance  : 
"Most  assuredly  she  hath  said  the^truth  :  I  confessed  myself 
guilty,  "because  I  wished  to  die  and  thought  it  best  for  both  of  us : 
and  now  that  my  hope  is  on.  the  moment  of  its  accomplishment, 
I  can  not  be  supposed  to  declare  myself  innocent  for  the  sake  of 
saving  my  life  ; — but  any  wretchedness  is  to  be  endured  rathei 
than  that  poor  creature  should  be  hurried  out  of  the  world  in  a 
state  of  despair." 

The  outcry  of  the  attending  populace  prevailed  to  suspend  the 
execution  :  a  report  was  sent  to  the  assembled  magistrates,  and 
in  the  mean  time  one  of  the  priests  reproached  the  widow  in.  bit 
ter  words  for  her  former  false  confession.  "  What,"  she  replied 
sternly  but  without  anger,  "  what  would  the  truth  have  availed? 
Before  I  perceived  my  friend's  purpose  I  did  deny  it :  my  assur 
ance  was  pronounced  an  impudent  lie  :  I  was  already  bound  for 
the  torture,  and  so  bound  that  the  sinews  of  rny  hands  started, 
and  one  of  their  worships  in  the  large  white  peruke,  threatened 
that  he  would  have  me  stretched  till  the  sun  shone  through  me  ; 
— and  that  then  I  should  cry  out,  Yes,  when  it  was  too  late." 
The  priest  was  hard-hearted  or  superstitious  enough  to  continue 
his  reproofs,  to  which  the  noble  woman  condescended  no  further 
answer.  The  other  clergyman,  however,  was  both  more  rational 
and  more  humane.  He  succeeded  in  silencing  his  colleague,  and 
the  former  half  of  the  long  hour,  which  the  magistrates  took  in 
making  speeches  on  the  improbability  of  the  tale  instead  of  re-ex 
amining  the  culprits  in  person,  he  employed  in  gaining  from  the 
widow  a  connected  account  of  all  the  circumstances,  and  in  lis 
tening  occasionally  to  Maria's  passionate  descriptions  of  all  her 
friend's  goodness  and  magnanimity.  For  she  had  gained  an  in 
flux  of  life  and  spirit  from  the  assurance  in  her  mind,  both  that 
she  had  now  rescued  Harlin  from  death  and  was  about  to  expiate 
the  guilt  of  her  purpose  by  her  own  execution.  For  the  latter 
half  of  the  time  the  clergyman  remained  in  silence,  lost  in 
thought,  and  momently  expecting  the  return  of  the  messenger. 
All  that  during  the  deep  silence  of  this  interval  could  be  heard, 
was  one  exclamation  of  Harlin  to  her  unhappy  friend — "  Oh  ! 
Maria  !  Maria  !  couldst  thou  but  have  kept  up  thy  courage  for 
another  minute,  we  should  have  been  now  in  heaven  !"  The 
messenger  carne  back  with  an  order  from  the  magistrates — to 
proceed  with  the  execution !  With  re-animated  countenance 


326  SECOND    LANDING-PLACE, 

Harlin  placed  her  neck  on  the  block  and  her  head  was  severed 
from  her  body  amid  a  genoral  shriek  from  the  crowd.  The  exe 
cutioner  fainted  after  the  blow,  and  the  under  hangman  was  or 
dered  to  take  his  place.  He  was  not  wanted.  Maria  was  al; 
ready  gone  :  her  body  was  found  as  cold  as  if  she  had  been  dead 
for  some  hours.  The  flower  had  been  snapt  in  the  storm,  before 
the  scythe  of  violence  could  come  near  it. 


ESSAY    II. 

The  history  of  times  representctli  the  magnitude  of  actions  and  the  pub 
lic  faces  and  deportment  of  persons,  and  passeth  over  in  silence  the  smaller 
passages  and  motions  of  men  and  matters.  But  such  being  the  workman 
ship  of  God,  as  he  doth  hang  the  greatest  weight  upon  the  smallest  wires, 
maxima  e  minimi s  suspendens ;  it  comes  therefore  to  pass,  that  such  his 
tories  do  rather  set  forth  the  pomp  of  business  than  the  true  and  inward 
resorts  thereof.  But  lives,  if  they  be  well  written,  propounding  to  them 
selves  a  person  to  represent  in  whom  actions  both  greater  and  smaller,  pub 
lic  and  private,  have  a  commixture,  must  of  necessity  contain  a  more  true, 
native,  and  lively  representation.  BACOX.* 

MANKIND  in  general  are  so  little  in  the  habit  of  looking  steadily 
at  their  own  meaning,  or  of  weighing  the  words  by  which  they 
express  it,  that  the  writer,  who  is  careful  to  do  both,  will  some 
times  mislead  his  readers  through  the  very  excellence  which 
qualifies  him  to  be  their  instructor :  and  this  with  no  other  fault 
on  his  part,  than  the  modest  mistake  of  supposing  in  those,  to 
whom  he  addresses  himself,  an  intellect  as  watchful  as  his  own. 
The  inattentive  reader  adopts  as  unconditionally  true,  or  perhaps 
rails  at  his  author  for  having  stated  as  such,  what  upon  examina 
tion  would  be  found  to  have  been  duly  limited,  and  would  so  have 
been  understood,  if  opaque  spots  arid  false  refractions  were  as  rare 
in  the  mental  as  in  the  bodily  eye.  The  motto,  for  instance,  to 
this  paper  has  more  than  once  served  as  an  excuse  and  authority 
for  huge  volumes  of  biographical  minutice,  which  render  the  real 
character  almost  invisible,  like  clouds  of  dust  on  a  portrait,  or  the 
counterfeit  frankincense  which  smoke-blacks  the  favorite  idol  of  a 

*  Advancement  of  Learning,  B.  ii. — Ed. 


ESSAY    II.  827 

Roman  Catholic  village.  Yet  Lord  Bacon,  by  the  expressions 
'  public  faces'  arid  '  propounding  to  themselves  a  person,'  evidently 
confines  the  biographer  to  such  facts  as-  are  either  susceptible  of 
some  useful  general  inference,  or  tend  to  illustrate  those  qualities 
which  distinguished  the  subject  of  them  from  ordinary  men  ; 
while  the  passage  in  general  wras  meant  to  guard  the  historian 
against  considering,  as  trifles,  all  that  might  appear  so  to  those 
who  recognize  no  greatness  in  the  mind,  and  can  conceive  no 
dignity  in  any  incident,  which  does  not  act  on  their  senses  by  its 
external  accompaniments,  or  on  their  curiosity  by  its  immediate 
consequences.  Things  apparently  insignificant  are  recommended 
to  our  notice,  not  for  their  own  sakes,  but  for  their  bearings  or  in 
fluences  on  things  of  importance  :  in  other  words,  when  they  are 
insignificant  in  appearance  only. 

An  inquisitiveness  into  the  minutest  circumstances  and  casual 
sayings  of  eminent  contemporaries  is  indeed  quite  natural  ;  but 
so  are  all  our  follies,  and  the  more  natural  they  are,  the  more 
caution  should  we  exert  in  guarding  against  them.  To  scribble 
trifles  even  on  the  perishable  glass  of  an  inn  window,  is  the  mark 
of  an  idler  ;  but  to  engrave  them  on  the  marble  monument, 
sacred  to  the  memory  of  the  departed  great,  is  something  worse 
than  idleness.  The  spirit  of  genuine  biography  is  in  nothing 
more  conspicuous,-  than  in  the  firmness  with  which  it  withstands 
the  cravings  of  worthless  curiosity,  as  distinguished  from  the 
thirst  after  useful  knowledge.  For,  in  the  first  place,  such  anec 
dotes  as  derive  their  whole  and  sole  interest  from  the  great  name 
of  the  person  concerning  whom  they  are  related,  arid  neither 
illustrate  his  general  character  nor  his  particular  actions,  would 
scarcely  have  been  noticed  or  remembered  except  by  men  of  weak 
minds  :  it  is  not  unlikely,  therefore,  that  they  were  misapprehend 
ed  at  the  time,  and  it  is  most  probable  that  they  have  been  re 
lated  as  incorrectly,  as  they  were  noticed  injudiciously.  Nor  are 
the  consequences  of  such  garrulous  biography  merely  negative 
For  as  insignificant  stories  can  derive  no  real  respectability  from 
the  eminence  of  the  person  who  happens  to  be  the  subject  of  them, 
but  rather  an  additional  deformity  of  disproportion,  they  are  apt 
to  have  their  insipidity  seasoned  by  the  same  bad  passions  that 
accompany  the  habit  of  gossiping  in  general  ;  and  the  misappre 
hensions  of  weak  men  meeting  with  the  misinterpretations  of  ma 
lignant  men,  have  not  seldom  formed  the  groundwork  of  the  most 


328     N  SECOND    LANDING-PLACE. 

•grievous  calumnies.     In  the  second  place,  these  trifles  are  subver 
sive  of  the  great  end  of  biography,  which  is  to  fix  the  attention, 
and  to  interest  the  feelings,  of  men  on  those  qualities  and  actions 
which  have  made  a  particular  life  worthy  of  being  recorded.     It 
is,  no  doubt,  the  duty  of  an  honest  biographer,  to  portray  the 
prominent  imperfections  as  well  as  excellencies  of  his  hero  ;  but 
I  am  at  a  loss  to  conceive  how  this  can  be  deemed  an  excuse  for 
heaping  together  a  multitude   of  particulars,  which  can  prove 
nothing  of  any  man  that  might  not  have  been  safely  taken  for 
granted  of  all  men.     In  the  present  age  (emphatically  the  age  of 
personality)  there  are  more  than  ordinary  motives  for  withholding 
all  encouragement  from  this  mania  of  busying  ourselves  with  the 
names  of  others,  which  is  still  more  alarming  as  a  symptom,  than 
it  is  troublesome  as  a  disease.     The  reader  must  be  still  less  ac 
quainted  with  contemporary  literature  than  myself — a  case  not 
likely  to  occur — if  he  needs  rne  to  inform  him  that  ^iere  are  men, 
who  trading  in  the  silliest  anecdotes,  in  unprovoked  abuse  and 
senseless   eulogy,  think  themselves  nevertheless   employed  both 
worthily  and  honorably,  if  only  all  this  be  done  in  good  set  terms, 
and  from  the  press,  and  of  public  characters, — a  class  which  has 
increased  so  rapidly  of  late,  that  it  becomes  difficult  to  discover 
what  characters  are  to  be  considered  as  private.     Alas  !  if  these 
wretched  misusers  of  language  and  the  means  of  giving  wings  to 
thought, — the  means  of  multiplying  the  presence  of  an  individual 
mind, — alas  !    had    they  ever   known,  how  great   a  thing   the 
possession  of  any  one  simple  truth  is,  and  how  mean,  a  thing  a 
mere  fact  is,  except  as  seen  in  the  light  of  some  comprehensive 
truth  ;  if  they  had  but  once  experienced  the  unborrowed  compla 
cency,  the  inward  independence,  the   homebred   strength,  with 
which  every  clear  conception  of  the  reason  is  accompanied  ;  they 
would  shrink  from  their  own  pages  as  at  the  remembrance  of  a 
crime.      For  a  crime  it  is  (and  the  man  \vho  hesitates  in  pro 
nouncing  it  such,  must   be    ignorant  of  what   mankind  owe  to 
books,  what  Ijp  himself  owes  to  them  in  spite  of  his  ignorance), 
thus  to  introduce  the  spirit  of  vulgar  scandal  and  personal  inquie 
tude  into  the  closet  and  the  library,  environing  with  evil  passions 
the  very  sanctuaries,  to  which  we,   should  flee  for  refuge  from 
them.     For  to  what  do  these  publications  appeal,  whether  they 
present  themselves  as  biography  or  as  anonymous  criticism,  but  to 
the  same  feelings  which  the  scandal-bearers  and  time-killers  of 


ESSAY    II.  329 

ordinary  life  seek  to  gratify  in  themselves  and  their  listeners  ? 
And  both  the  authors  and  admirers  of  such  publications,  in  what 
respect  are  they  less  truants  and  deserters  from  their  own  hearts, 
and  from  their  appointed  task  of  understanding  and  amending 
them,  than  the  most  garrulous  female  chronicler  of  the  goings-on, 
of  yesterday  in  the  families  of  her  neighbors  and  townsfolk  ? 

I  have  reprinted  the  following  biographial  sketch,  partly  in 
deed  in  the  hope  that  it  may  be  t^  means  of  introducing  to  the 
reader's  knowledge,  in  case  he  should  not  have  formed  an  ac 
quaintance  with  them  already,  two  of  the  most  interesting 
biographical  works  in  our  language,  both  for  the  weight  of  the 
matter,  and  the  incuriosa  felicitas  of  the  style.  I  refer  to 
Roger  North's  Examen,  and  the  Life  of  his  brother,  the  Lord 
Keeper  Guilford.  The  pages  are  all  alive  with  the  genuine 
idioms  of  our  mother-tongue. 

A  fastidious  taste,  it  is  true,  will  find  offence  in  the  occasional 
vulgarisms,  or  what  we  now  call  slang,  which  not  a  few  of  our 
writers,  shortly  after  the  restoration  of  Charles  II. ,  seem  to  have 
affected  as  a  mark  of  loyalty.  These  instances,  however,  are 
but  a  trifling  drawback.  They  are  not  sought  for,  as  is  too  often 
and  too  plainly  done  by  L'Estrange,  Collyer,  Tom  Brown,  and 
their  imitators.  North  never  goes  out  of  his  way  either  to  seek 
them  or  to  avoid  them  ;  and  in  the  main  his  language  gives  us 
the  very  nerve,  pulse,  and  sinew  of  a  hearty,  healthy,  conversa 
tional  English. 

This  is  my  first  reason  for  the  insertion  of  this  extract.  My 
other  and  principal  motive  may  be  found  in  the  kindly  good-tem 
pered  spirit  of  the  passage.  But  instead  of  troubling  the  reader 
with  the  painful  contrast  which  so  many  recollections  force  on 
my  own  feelings,  I  will  refer  the  character-makers  of  the  present 
day  to  the  letters  of  Erasmus  and  Sir  Thomas  More  to  Martin 
Dorpius,  which  are  commonly  annexed  to  the  Encomium  Morice; 
and  then  for  a  practical  comment  on  the  just  and  affecting  sen 
timents  of  those  two  great  men,  to  the  works  of  Roger  North,  as 
proofs  how  alone  an  English  scholar  and  gentleman  will  permit 
himself  to  delineate  his  contemporaries  even  under  the  strongest 
prejudices  of  party  spirit,  and  though  employed  011  the  coarsest 
subjects.  A  coarser  subject  than  the  Chief  Justice  Saunders 
can  not  well  be  imagined  :  nor  does  North  use  his  colors  with  a 


830  SECOND    LANDING-PLACE. 

sparing  or  very  delicate  hand  ;   and  yet  the  final  impression  is 
that  of  kindness. 


EXTRACT    FROM    NORTH  S    LIFE    OF    THE    LORD    KEEPER    GUILFORD. 

The  Lord  Chief  Justice  Saunders  succeeded  in  the  room  of 
Pemberton.  His  character  and  his  beginning  were  equally 
strange.  He  was  at  first  no^better  than  a  poor  beggar  boy,  if 
not  a  parish  foundling,  without  known  parents  or  relations.  He 
had  found  a  way  to  live  by  obsequiousness  in  Clement's  Inn,  as 
I  remember,  and  courting  the  attorney's  clerks  for  scraps.  The 
extraordinary  observance  and  diligence  of  the  boy  made  the  so 
ciety  willing  to  do  him  good.  He  appeared  very  ambitious  to 
learn  to  write  ;  and  one  of  the  attorneys  got  a  board  knocked  up 
at  a  window  on  the  top  of  a  stair-case ;  and  that  was  his  desk, 
where  he  sat  and  wrote  after  copies  of  court  and  other  hands 
the  clerks  gave  him.  He  made  himself  so  expert  a  writer  that 
he  took  in  business,  and  earned  some  pence  by  hackney-writing. 
And  thus  by  degrees  he  pushed  his  faculties,  and  fell  to  forms, 
and,  by  books  that  were  lent  him,  became  an  exquisite  entering 
clerk ;  and,  by  the  same  course  of  improvement  of  himself,  an 
able  counsel,  first  in  special  pleading,  then  at  large ;  and  after 
he  was  called  to  the  bar,  had  practice  in  the  King's  Bench  court 
equal  to  any  there.  As  to  his  person  he  was  very  corpulent  and 
beastly  ;  a  mere  lump  of  morbid  flesh.  He  used  to  say,  "  By 
his  troggs"  (such  a  humorous  way  of  talking  he  affected),  "  none 
could  say  he  wanted  issue  of  his  body,  for  he  had  nine  in  his 
back."  He  was  a  fetid  mass,  that  offended  his  neighbors  at  the 
bar  in  the  sharpest  degree.  Those,  whose  ill-fortune  it  was  to 
stand  near  him,  were  confessors,  and,  in  summer-time,  almost 
martyrs.  This  hateful  decay  of  his  carcass  came  upon  him  by 
continual  sottishness  ;  for  to  say  nothing  of  brandy,  he  was  sel 
dom  without  a  pot  of  ale  at  his  nose,  or  near  him.  That  exer 
cise  was  all  he  used  ;  the  rest  of  his  life  was  sitting  at  his  desk 
or  piping  at  home  ;  and  that  home  was  a  tailor's  house  in 
Butcher  Row,  called  his  lodging,  and  the  man's  wife  was  his 
nurse  or  worse  ;  but  by  virtue  of  his  money,  of  which  he  made 
little  account,  though  he  got  a  great  deal,  he  soon  became  mas 
ter  of  the  family  ;  and,  being  no  changeling,  he  never  removed, 

*  Edit.  1826,  vol.  ii.  p.  41.— Ed. 


ESSAY    II.  831 

but  was  true  to  his  friends,  and  they  to  him,  to  the  last  hour  of 
his  life. 

So  much  for  his  person  and  education.  As  for  his  parts,  none 
had  them  more  lively  than  he.  Wit  and  repartee  in  an  affected 
rusticity  were  natural  to  him.  He  was  ever  ready,  and  never  at 
a  loss  ;  and  none  came  so  near  as  he  to  he  a  match  for  Serjeant 
Maynard.  His  great  dexterity  was  in  the  art  of  special  pleading, 
and  he  would  lay  snares  that  often  caught  his  superiors  who 
were  not  aware  of  his  traps.  And  he  was  so  fond  of  success  for 
his  clients,  that,  rather  than  fail,  he  would  set  the  court  hard 
with  a  trick  :  for  which  he  met  sometimes  with  a  reprimand, 
which  he  would  wittily  ward  off,  so  that  no  one  was  much  of 
fended  with  him.  But  Hale  could  not  bear  his  irregularity  of 
'ife  ;  and  for  that,  and  suspicion  of  his  tricks,  used  to  bear  hard 
upon  him  in  the  court.  But  no  ill  usage  from  the  bench  was 
too  hard  for  his  hold  of  business,  being  such  as  scarce  any  could 
do  but  himself.  With  all  this,  he  had  a  goodness  of  nature  and 
disposition  in  so  great  a  degree,  that  he  may  be  deservedly  styled 
a  philanthrope.  He  was  a  very  Silenus  to  the  boys,  as,  in  this 
place  I  may  term  the  students  of  the  law,  to  make  them  merry 
whenever  they  had  a  mind  to  it.  He  had  nothing  of  rigid  or 
austere  in  him.  If  any  near  him  at  the  bar  grumbled  at  his 
stench,  he  ever  converted  the  complaint  into  content  and  laugh 
ing  with  the  abundance  of  his  wit.  As  to  his  ordinary  dealing, 
he  was  as  honest  as  the  driven  snow  was  white  ;  and  why  not, 
having  no  regard  for  money,  or  desire  to  be  rich  ?  And  for  good 
nature  and  condescension,  there  was  not  his  fellow.  I  have  seen 
him  for  hours  and  half-hours  together,  before  the  court  sat,  stand 
at  the  bar  with  an  audience  of  students  over  against  him,  put 
ting  of  cases  and  debating  so  as  suited  their  capacities,  and  en 
couraged  their  industry.  And  so  in  the  Temple,  he  seldom  moved 
without  a  parcel  of  youths  hanging  about  him,  and  he  merry 
and  jesting  with  them. 

It  will  be  readily  conceived  that  this  man  was  never  cut  out 
to  be  a  presbyter,  or  any  thing  that  is  severe  and  crabbed.  In 
no  time  did  he  lean  to  faction,  but  did  his  business  without  of 
fence  to  any.  He  put  off  officious  talk  of  government  or  politics 
with  jests,  and  so  made  his  wit  a  catholicon  or  shield,  to  cover  all 
his  weak  places  or  infirmities.  When  the  court  fell  into  a  steady 
course  of  using  the  law  against  all  kinds  of  offenders,  this  man 


332  SECOND    LANDING-PLACE. 

was  taken  into  the  king's  business  ;  and  had  the  part  of  draw 
ing  and  perusal  of  almost  all  indictments  and  informations  that 
were  then  to  be  prosecuted,  with  the  pleadings  thereon,  if  any 
were  special  ;  and  he  had  the  settling  of  the  large  pleadings  in 
the  quo  warranto  against  London.     His  Lordship  had  no  sort  of 
conversation  with  him  but  in  the  way  of  business  and  at  the  bar  ; 
but  once,  after  he  was  in  the  king's  business,  he  dined  with  His 
Lordship,  and  no  more.     And  there  he  showed  another  qualifi 
cation  he  had  acquired,  and  that  was  to  play  jigs  upon  a  harpsi 
chord  ;  having  taught  himself  with  the  opportunity  of  an  old 
virginal  of  his  landlady's  ;  but  in  such  a  manner,  not  for  defect, 
but  figure,  as  to  see  him  were  a  jest.     The  king,  observing  him 
to  be  of  a  free  disposition,  loyal,  friendly,  and  without  greediness 
or  guile,  thought  of  him  to  be  the  chief  justice  of  the  King's 
Bench  at  that  nice  time.     And  the  ministry  could  not  but  ap 
prove  of  it.     So  great  a  weight  was  then  at  stake,  as  could  not 
be  trusted  to  men  of  doubtful  principles,  or  such  as  any  thing 
might  tempt  to  desert  them.     While  he  sat  in  the  court  of  King's 
Bench,  he  gave  the  rule  to  the  general  satisfaction  of  the  law 
yers.     But  his  course  of  life  was  so  different  from  what  it  had 
been,  his  business  incessant,  and  withal  crabbed,  and  his  diet  and 
exercise  changed,  that  the  constitution  of  his  body,  or  head  rath 
er,  could  not  sustain  it,  and  he  fell  into  an  apoplexy  and  palsy, 
which  numbed  his  parts  ;  and  he  never  recovered  the  strength  of 
them.     He  outlived  the  judgment  in  the  quo  ivarranto  ;  but  was 
not  present  otherwise  than  by  sending  his  opinion  by  one  of  the 
judges,  to  be  for  the  king,  who  at  the  pronouncing  of  the  judg 
ment,  declared  it  to   the  court  accordingly,  which  is  frequently 
done  in  like  cases. 


ESSAY    III. 

Proinde  si  vidt'bilur,  fingant  isti  me  latrunculis  interim  animi  causa  lu- 
sisse,  aut  si  malint,  equitasse  in  arundine  longa.  Nam  qucK  tandem  est  ini- 
quitas,  cum  omni  vita  instituto  suos  hisus  concedamus,  studiis  nullum  orn- 
nino  lusum  permittere :  maxime  si  nugce  scria  diicant,  atque  ita  tractentur 
ludicra,  ut  ex  his  aliquanto  plus  frugis  referat  lector  non  omnino  naris 
obcsa  quam  ex  quorundam  tetricis  ac  splendidis  argumentis?  ERASMUS.* 

They  may  pretend,  if  they  like,  that  I  amuse  myself  with  playing  at  fox 
and  goose,  or,  if  they  prefer  it,  that  I  ride  the  cock-horse  on  my  grandani's 
crutch.  For  is  it  not,  I  ask,  very  unfair,  when  every  trade  and  profession 
is  allowed  its  own  sport  and  travesty,  not  to  extend  the  same  permission  to 
literature ; — especially  if  trifles  are  so  handled,  that  a  reader  of  tolerable 
quickness  may  occasionally  derive  from  them  more  food  for  profitable  re 
flection  than  from  many  a  work  of  grand  or  gloomy  argument  ? 

IRUS,  the  forlorn  Irus,  whose  nourishment  consisted  in  bread 
and  water,  whose  clothing  was  of  one  tattered  mantle,  and  whose 
bed  of  an  armful  of  straw,  this  same  Irus,  by  a  rapid  transition 
of  fortune,  became  the  most  prosperous  mortal  under  the  sun. 
It  pleased  the  gods  to  snatch  him  at  once  out  of  the  dust  and  to 
place  him  by  the  side  of  princes.  He  beheld  himself  in  the  pos 
session  of  incalculable  treasures.  His  palace  excelled  even  the 
temple  of  the  gods  in  the  pomp  of  its  ornaments  ;  his  least  sump 
tuous  clothing  was  of  purple  and  gold,  and  his  table  might  well 
have  been  named  the  compendium  of  luxury,  the  summary  of  all 
that  the  voluptuous  ingenuity  of  men  had  invented  for  the  grati 
fication  of  the  palate.  A  numerous  train  of  admiring  dependents 
followed  him  at  every  step  ;  those  to  whom  he  vouchsafed  a  gra 
cious  look  were  esteemed  already  in  the  high  road  of  fortune,  and 
the  favored  individual  who  was  permitted  to  kiss  his  hand  ap 
peared  to  be  the  object  of  common  envy.  The  name  of  Irus 
sounding  in  his  ears  an  unwelcome  memento  and  perpetual  re 
proach  of  his  former  poverty,  he  for  this  reason  named  himself 

*  Prof,  ad  Moria  Encom. 


834  SECOND    LANDING-PLACE. 

Ceraunius,  or  the  Lightning-flasher,  and  the  whole  people  cele 
brated  this  splendid  change  of  title  by  public  rejoicings.     The 
poet,  who  a  few  years  ago  had  personified  poverty  itself  under 
his  former  name  of  Irus,  now  made  a  discovery  which  had  till 
that  moment  remained  a  profound  secret,  but  was  now  received 
by  all  with  implicit  faith  and  warmest  approbation.     Jupiter, 
forsooth,  had  become  enamored  of  the  mother  of  Ceraunius,  arid 
assumed  the  ibrm  of  a  mortal  in  order  to  enjoy  her  love.     Hence 
forward  they  erected  altars  to  him,  they  swore  by  his  name,  and 
the  priests  discovered  in  the  entrails  of  the  sacrificial  victim,  that 
the  great  Ceraunius,  this  worthy  son  of  Jupiter,  was  the  sole  pil 
lar  of  the  western  world.      Toxaris,  his  former  neighbor,  a  man 
whom  good  fortune,  unwearied  industry,  and  rational  frugality, 
had  placed  among  the  richest  citizens,  became  the  first  victim  of 
the  pride  of  this  new  demi-god.     In  the  time  of  his  poverty  Irus 
had  repined  at  his  luck  and  prosperity,  and  irritable  from  distress 
and  envy,  had  conceived  that  Toxaris  had  looked  contemptuously 
on  him  ;  and  now  was  the  time  that  Ceraunius  would  make  him 
feel  the  power  of  him,  whose   father  grasped  the  thunderbolt. 
Three  advocates,  newly  admitted  into  the  recently  established 
order  of  the  Cygnet,  gave  evidence  that  Toxaris  had  denied  the 
gods,   committed  peculations  on   the   sacred   treasury,    and    in 
creased  his  treasures  by  acts  of  sacrilege.     He  was  hurried  off  to 
prison  and  sentenced  to  an  ignominious  death,  and  his  wealth 
confiscated  to  the  use  of  Ceraunius,  the  earthly  representative  of 
the  deities.     Ceraunius  now  found  nothing  wanting  to  his  felicity 
but  a  bride  worthy  of  his  rank  and  blooming  honors.     The  most 
illustrious  of  the  land  were  candidates  for  his  alliance.     Euphor 
bia,  the  daughter  of  the  noble  Austrius,  was  honored  with  his 
final  choice.     To  nobility  of  birth  nature  had  added  for  Euphor 
bia,  a  rich  dowry  of  beauty,  a  nobleness  both  of  look  and  stature. 
The  flowing  ringlets  of  her  hair,  her  lofty  forehead,  her  brilliant 
eyes,  her  stately  figure,  her  majestic  gait,  had   enchanted  the 
haughty  Ceraunius  :  and  all  the  bards  told  what  the  inspiring 
Muses  had  revealed  to  them,  that  Venus  more  than  once  had 
pined  with  jealousy  at  the  sight  of  her  superior  charms.     The 
day  of  espousal  arrived,  and  the  illustrious  son  of  Jove  was  pro 
ceeding  in  pomp  to  the  temple,  when  the  anguish-stricken  wife 
of  Toxaris,   with  his   innocent  children,  suddenly  threw  them 
selves  at  his  feet,  and  with  loud  lamentations  entreated  him  to 


ESSAY    III.  335 

spare  the  life  of  her  husband.  Enraged  by  this  interruption, 
Ceraunius  spurned  her  from  him  with  his  feet  and — Irus  awoke, 
and  found  himself  lying  on  the  same  straw  on  which  he  had  lain 
down,  and  with  his  old  tattered  mantle  spread  over  him.  With 
his  returning  reason,  conscience  too  returned.  He  praised  the 
gods  and  resigned  himself  to  his  lot.  Ceraunius  indeed  had  van 
ished,  but  the  innocent  Toxaris  was  still  alive,  and  Irus  poor  yet 
guiltless. 

Can  my  reader  recollect  no  individual  now  on  earth,  who  some 
time  or  oilier  will  awake  from  his  dream  of  empire,  poor  as  Irus, 
with  all  the  guilt  and  impiety  of  Ceraunius  ?* 

The  reader  will  bear  in  mind,  that  this  fable  was  written  and 
first  published,  at  the  close  of  1809  : — 

6f.  re 


CHRISTMAS   WITHIN    BOOKS,  IN    THE    NORTH    OF    GERMANY. 

RATZEBUKG,  1799. 

There  is  a  Christmas  custom  here  which  pleased  and  inter 
ested  me. — The  children  make  little  presents  to  their  parents, 
and  to  each  other  ;  and  the  parents  to  the  children.  For  three 
or  four  months  before  Christmas  the  girls  are  all  busy,  and  the 
boys  save  up  their  pocket-money,  to  make  or  purchase  these  pres 
ents.  What  the  present  is  to  be  is  cautiously  kept  secret,  and 
the  girls  have  a  world  of  contrivances  to  conceal  it — such  as 
working  when  they  are  out  on  visits  and  the  others  are  not  with 
them  ;  getting  up  in  the  morning  before  daylight,  arid  the  like. 
Then  on  the  evening  before  Christmas-day,  one  of  the  parlors  is 
lighted  up  by  the  children,  into  which  the  parents  must  not  go. 
A  great  yew  bough  is  fastened  on  the  table  at  a  little  distance 
from  the  wall,  a  multitude  of  little  tapers  are  fastened  in  the 
bough,  but  so  as  not  to  catch  it  till  they  are  nearly  burnt  out, 
and  colored  paper  hangs  and  nutters  from  the  twigs.  Under  this 
bough  the  children  lay  out  in  great  order  the  presents  they  mean 
for  their  parents,  still  concealing  in  their  pockets  what  they  in 
tend  for  each  other.  Then  the  parents  are  introduced,  and  each 
presents  his  little  gift,  and  then  bring  out  the  rest  one  by  one 
from  their  pockets,  and  present  them  with  kisses  and  embraces. 
*  BoBBparte.— Ed. 


336  SECOND    LANDING-PLACE. 

Where  I  witnessed  this  scene,  there  were  eight  or  nine  children, 
and  the  eldest  daughter  and  the  mother  wept  aloud  for  joy  and 
tenderness  ;  and  the  tears  ran  down  the  face  of  the  father,  and 
he  clasped  all  his  children  so  tight  to  his  breast,  it  seemed  as  if 
he  did  it  to  stifle  the  sob  that  was  rising  within  him.  *l  was 
very  much  affected.  The  shadow  of  the  bough  and  its  appenda 
ges  on  the  wall,  and  arching  over  on  the  ceiling,  made  a  pretty 
picture  ;  and  then  the  raptures  of  the  very  little  ones,  when  at 
last  the  twigs  and  their  needles  began  to  take  fire  and  snap  !  0 
it  was  a  delight  for  them  ! — On  the  next  day,  in  the  great  par 
lor,  the  parents  lay  out  on  the  table  the  presents  for  the  children  : 
a  scene  of  more  sober  joy  succeeds,  as  on  this  day,  after  an  old 
sustom,  the  mother  says  privately  to  each  of  her  daughters,  and 
the  father  to  his  sons,  that  which  he  has  observed  most  praise 
worthy  and  that  which  was  most  faulty  in  their  conduct.  For 
merly,  and  still  in  all  the  smaller  towns  and  villages  throughout 
North  Germany,  these  presents  were  sent  by  all  the  parents  to 
Korne  one  fellow,  who  in  high  buskins,  a  white  robe,  a  mask,  and 
an  enormous  flax  wig,  personates  Knecht  Rupert,  the  servant 
Rupert.  On  Christmas  night  he  goes  round  to  every  house  and 
says,  that  Jesus  Christ  his  master  sent  him  thither  ; — the  parents 
and  elder  children  receive  him  with  great  pomp  of  reverence, 
while  the  little  ones  are  most  terribly  frightened.  He  then  in 
quires  for  the  children,  and  according  to  the  character  which  he 
hears  from  the  parent,  he  gives  them  the  intended  present,  as  if 
they  came  out  of  heaven  from  Jesus  Christ.  Or,  if  they  should 
have  been  bad  children,  he  gives  the  parents  a  rod,  and  in  the 
1  name  of  his  master  recommends  them  to  use  it  frequently.  About 
seven  or  eight  years  old  the  children  are  let  into  the  secret,  and 
it  is  curious  to  observe  how  faithfully  they  keep  it. 

CHRISTMAS    OUT    OF    DOORS. 

The  whole  lake  of  Ratzeburg  is  one  mass  of  thick  transparent 
ice,  a  spotless  mirror  of  nine  miles  in  extent.  The  lowness  of 
the  hills,  which  rise  from  the  shores  of  the  lake,  precludes  the 
awful  sublimity  of  Alpine  landscape,  yet  compensates  for  the 
want  of  it  by  beauties,  of  which  this  very  lowness  is  a  necessary 
condition.  Ycster-morning  I  saw  the  lesser  lake  completely  hid 
den  by  mist ;  but  the  moment  the  sun  peeped  over  the  hill,  the 


ESSAY    III.  337 

mist  broke  in  the  middle,  and  in  a  few  seconds  stood  divided, 
leaving  a  broad  road  all  across  the  lake  ;  and  between  these  two 
walls  of  mist  the  sunlight  burnt  upon  the  ice,  forming  a  road  of 
golden  fire,  intolerably  bright,  and  the  mist-walls  themselves  par 
took  of  the  blaze  in  a  multitude  of  shining  colors.  This  is  our 
second  frost.  About  a  month  ago,  before  the  thaw  came  on,  there 
was  a  storm  of  wind  ;  and  during  the  whole  night,  such  were  the 
thunders  and  howlings  of  the  breaking  ice,  that  they  have  left  a 
conviction  on  my  mind,  that  there  are  sounds  more  sublime  than 
any  sight  can  be,  more  absolutely  suspending  the  power  of  com 
parison,  and  more  utterly  absorbing  the  mind's  self-consciousness 
in  its  total  attention  to  the  object  working  upon  it.  Part  of  the 
ice  which  the  vehemence  of  the  wind  had  shattered,  was  driven 
shoreward  and  froze  anew.  On  the  evening  of  the  next  day,  at 
sunset,  the  shattered  ice  thus  frozen,  appeared  of  a  deep  blue,  and. 
in  shape  like  an  agitated  sea  ;  beyond  this,  the  water  that  ran  up 
between  the  great  islands  of  ice  which  had  preserved  their  masses 
entire  and  smooth,  shone  of  a  yellow  green  ;  but  all  these  scat 
tered  ice-klands,  themselves,  were  of  an  intensely  bright  blood 
color, — they  seemed  blood  and  light  in  union.  On  some  of  the 
largest  of  these  islands,  the  fishermen  stood  pulling  out  their  im 
mense  nets  through  the  holes  made  in  the  ice  for  this  purpose, 
arid  the  men,  their  net-poles,  and  their  huge  nets,  were  a  part  of 
the  glory  ;  say  rather,  it  appeared  as  if  the  rich  crimson  light  had 
shaped  itself  into  these  forms,  figures,  and  attitudes,  to  make  a 
glorious  vision  in  mockery  of  earthly  things. 

The  lower  lake  is  now  all  alive  with  skaters,  and  with  ladies 
driven  onward  by  them  in  their  ice  cars.  Mercury,  surely,  was 
the  first  maker  of  skates,  and  the  wings  at  his  feet  are  symbols 
of  the  invention.  In  skating  there  are  three  pleasing  circum 
stances  ;  the  infinitely  subtle  particles  of  ice  which  the  skate  cuts 
up,  and  which  creep  and  run  before  the  skate  like  a  low  mist, 
and  in  sunrise  or  sunset  become  colored ;  second,  the  shadow  of 
the  skater  in  the  water,  seen  through  the  transparent  ice  ;  and 
third,  the  melancholy  undulating  sound  from  the  skate,  not  with 
out  variety ;  and  when  very  many  are  skating  together,  the  sounds 
and  the  noises  give  an  impulse  to  the  icy  trees,  and  the  woods  all 
round  the  lake  tinkle. 

Here  I  stop,  having  in  truth  transcribed  the  preceding  in  great 
measure,  in  order  to  present  the  lovers  of  poetry  with  a  descrip- 

VOL.  n.  P 


338  SECONJO    LANDING-PLACE. 

tive  passage,  extracted  with  the  "author's  permission,  from  an  un 
published  poem  on  the  growth  and  revolutions  of  an  individual 
mind  by  Wordsworth  : — 

— an  Orphic  tale  indeed, 
A  tale  divine  of  high  and  passionate  thoughts 
To  their  own  music  chanted  1* 

GROWTH  OF  GENIUS  FROM  THE  INFLUENCES  OF  NATURAL  OBJECTS  OS 
THE  IMAGINATION  IN  BOYHOOD  AND  EARLY  YOUTH. 

Wisdom  acd  spirit  of  the  universe ! 

Thou  soul,  that  art  the  eternity  of  thought ! 

And  giv'st  to  forms  and  images-  a  breath 

And  everlasting  motion !  not  in  vain, 

By  day  or  star -light,  thus  from  my  first  dawn 

Of  childhood  didst  thou  intertwine  for  me 

The  passions  that  build  up  our  human  soul, 

Nor  with  the  mean  and  vulgar  works  of  man*, 

But  with  high  objects,  with  enduring  things, 

With  life  and  nature  :  purifying  thus 

The  elements  of  feeling  and  of  thought,  » 

And  sanctifying  by  such  discipline 

Both  pain  and  fear,  until  we  recognize 

A  grandeur  in  the  beatings  of  the  heart. 

Nor  was  this  fellowship  vouchsaf 'd  to  me 
With  stinted  kindness.     In  November  days 
When  vapors  rolling  down  the  valleys  made 
A  lonely  scene  more  lonesome ;  among  woods 
At  noon,  and  'mid  the  calm  of  summer  nights, 
When  by  the  margin  of  the  trembling  lake, 
Beneath  the  gloomy  hills  I  homeward  went 
In  solitude,  such  intercourse  Avas  mine ; 
Twas  mine  among  the  fields  both  day  and  night, 
And  by  the  waters  all  the  summer  long. 

And  in  the  frosty  season  when  the  sun 
Was  set,  and,  visible  for  many  a  mile 
The  cottage  windows  through  the  twilight  blazed, 
I  heeded  not  the  summons : — happy  time 
It  was  indeed  for  all  of  us,  to  me 
It  was  a  time  of  rapture :  clear  and  loud 
The  village  clock  toll'd  six ; — I  wheel'd  about 
Proud  and  exulting,  like  an  untir'd  horse 
That  car'd  not  for  its  home. — All  shod  with  steel 
We  hiss'd  along  the  polish'd  ice,  in  games 

*  Poetical  Works,  VII.  p.  159.— Ed. 


ESSAY    III.  339 

Confederate,  imitative  of  the  chase 

And  woodland  pleasures,  the  resounding  horn, 

The  pack  loud  bellowing,  and  the  hunted  hare. 

So  through  the  darkness  and  the  cold  we  flew, 

And  not  a  voice  was  idle  :  with  the  din 

Meanwhile  the  precipices  rang  aloud, 

The  leafless  trees  and  every  icy  crag 

Tinkled  like  iron,  while  the  distant  hills 

Into  the  tumult  sent  an  alien  sound 

Of  melancholy — not  unnoticed,  while  the  stars, 

Eastward,  were  sparkling  clear,  and  in  the  west 

The  orange  sky  of  evening  died  away. 

Not  seldom  from  the  uproar  I  retired 
Into  a  silent  bay  or  sportively 
Glanc'd  sideway,  leaving  the  tumultuous  throng, 
To  cut  across  the  image  of  a  star 
That  gleam'd  upon  the  ice :  and  oftentimes 
"When  we  had  given  our  bodies  to  the  wind, 
And  all  the  shadowy  banks  on  either  side 
Came  sweeping  through  the  darkness  spitming  still 
The  rapid  line  of  motion,  then  at  once 
Have  I  reclined  back  upon  my  heels 
Stopp'd  short :  yet  still  the  solitary  cliffs 
Wheel'd  by  me  even  as  if  the  earth  had  roll'd 
"With  visible  motion  her  diurnal  round  : 
Behind  me  did  they  stretch  in  solemn  train 
Feebler  and  feebler,  and  I  stood  and  watch'd 
Till  all  was  tranquil  as  a  summer  sea. 


ESSAY    IV. 

Es  ist  fast  traurig  zu  sehen,  wie  man  vou  der  Ifebraischcn  Qucllcn  so  ganz 
sick  abgewendct  hat.  In  ^Egyptens  selbzt  dimkeln  unentrdthselbaren  Hie- 
roglyphen  hat  man  den  Schlilssel  alter  Weishcit  suchen  wollcn  ;  jetzt  ist  von 
nichts  als  Indicns  Sprache  und  Wcisheit  die  Rede ;  aber  die  Rabbinische 
Schriften  liegen  unerforscht.  SCHELLING. 

It  is  mournful  to  observe,  tow  entirely  we  have  turned  our  backs  on  the 
Hebrew  sources.  In  the  obscure,  insolvable  riddles  of  the  Egyptian  hiero 
glyphics  the  learned  have  been  hoping  to  find  the  key  of  ancient  doctrine, 
and  now  we  hear  of  nothing  but  the  language  and  wisdom  of  India,  while 
the  writings  and  traditions  of  the  Rabbins  are  consigned  to  neglect  without 
examination. 

THE  LORD  HELPETH  MAN  AND  BEAST. 

DURING  his  march  to  conquer  the  world,  Alexander  the  Mace 
donian  came  to  a  people  in  Africa,  who  dwelt,  in  a  remote  and 
secluded  corner,  in  peaceful  huts,  and  knew  neither  war  nor  con 
queror.  They  led  him  to  the  hut  of  their  chief,  who  received 
him  hospitably,  and  placed  before  him  golden  dates,  golden  figs, 
and  bread  of  gold.  "  Do  fou  eat  gold  in  this  country  ?"  said 
Alexander.  "  I  take  it  for  granted,"  replied  the  chief, '"  that  thou 
wast  able  to  find  eatable  food  in  thine  own  country.  For  what 
reason  then  art  thou  come  among  us  ?"  "  Your  gold  has  not 
tempted  me  hither,"  said  Alexander,  "  but  I  would  willingly  be 
come  acquainted  with  your  manners  and  customs."  "  So  be  it," 
rejoined  the  other  ;  "  sojourn  among  us  as  long  as  it  pleaseth 
thee."  At  the  close  of  this  conversation  two  citizens  entered  as 
into  their  court  of  justice.  The  plaintiff  said,  "  I  bought  of  this 
man  a  piece  of  land,  and  as  I  was  making  a  deep  drain  through 
it  I  found  a  treasure.  This  is  not  mine,  for  I  only  bargained  for 
the  land,  and  not  for  any  treasure  that  might  be  concealed  be 
neath  it  :  and  yet  the  former  owner  of  the  land  will  not  receive 
it."  The  defendant  answered  :  "I  hope  I  have  a  conscience  as 


ESSAY    IV.  341 

well  as  my  fellow-citizen.  I  sold  him  the  land  with  all  its  con 
tingent,  as  well  as  existing  advantages,  and  consequently  the 
treasure  inclusively." 

The  chief,  who  was  at  the  same  time  their  supreme  judge, 
recapitulated  their  words,  in  order  that  the  parties  might  see 
whether  or  no  he  understood  them  aright.  Then  after  some  re 
flection,  said  :  "  Thou  hast  a  son,  friend,  I  believe  ?"  "  Yes  !" 
"  And  thou"  (addressing  the  other)  "  a  daughter  ?"  "  Yes  !" — 
"  Well,  then,  let  thy  son  marry  thy  daughter,  and  bestow  the 
treasure  on  the  young  couple  for  their  marriage  portion."  Alex 
ander  seemed  surprised  and  perplexed.  "  Think  you  my  sentence 
unjust  ?"  the  chief  asked  him.  "  0  no,"  replied  Alexander,  "but 
it  astonishes  me."  "  And  how,  then,"  rejoined  the  chief, 
'•'  would  the  case  have  been  decided  in  your  country  ?"  "  To 
confess  the  truth,"  said  Alexander,  "  we  should  have  taken  both 
parties  into  custody,  and  have  seized  the  treasure  for  the  king's 
use."  "  For  the  king's  use  !"  exclaimed  the  chief,  now  in  his 
turn  astonished.  "Does  the  sun  shine  on  that  country  ?" — "  0 
yes  !"  "  Does  it  rain  there  ?" — "  Assuredly."  "  Wonderful  ! 
but  are  there  tame  animals  in  the  country  that  live  on  the  grass 
and  green  herbs  ?"  "  Very  many,  and  of  many  kinds."  "  Ay, 
that  must  be  the  cause,"  said  the  chief:  "  for  the  sake  of  those 
innocent  animals  the  all-gracious  Being  continues  to  let  the  sun 
shine  and  the  rain  drop  down  on  your  country." 

WHOSO    HATH    FOUND    A    VIRTUOUS    WIFE    HATH    A    GREATER 
TREASURE    THAN    COSTLY    PEARLS. 

Such  a  treasure  had  the  celebrated  teacher  HABBI  MEIR  found. 
He  sat  during  the  whole  of  one  Sabbath  day  in  the  public  school, 
and  instructed  the  people.  During  his  absence  from  his  house 
his  two  sons  died,  both  of  them  of  uncommon  beauty  and  enlight 
ened  in  the  law.  His  wife  bore  them  to  her  bed-chamber,  laid 
them  upon  the  marriage-bed,  and  spread  a  white  covering  over 
their  bodies.  In  the  evening  Rabbi  Meir  came  home.  "  Where 
are  my  two  sons,"  he  asked,  "  that  I  may  give  them  my  bless 
ing  ?"  "  They  are  gone  to  the  school,"  was  the  answer.  "  I 
repeatedly  looked  round  the  school,"  he  replied,  "  and  I  did  not 
see  them  there."  She  reached  to  him  a  goblet,  he  praised  the 
Lord  at  the  going  out  of  the  Sabbath,  drank,  and  again  asked  : 


342  SECOND    LANDING-PLACE. 

"  "Where  are  my  .sons,  that  they  too  may  drink  of  the  cup  of  bless 
ing  ?"  "  They  will  not  be  far  off,"  she  said,  and  placed  food  be 
fore  him  that  he  might  eat.  He  was  in  a  gladsome  and  genial 
.mood,  and  when  he  had  said  grace  after  the  meal,  she  thus  ad 
dressed  him  :  "  Rabbi,  with  thy  permission  I  would  fain  propose 
to  thee  one  question."  "Ask  it  then,  my  love  !"  he  replied. 
"  A  few  days  ago,  a  person  intrusted  some  jewels  to  my  custody, 
and  now  he  demands  them  :  should  I  give  them  back  ?"  '.'  This 
is  a  question,"  said  Rabbi  Meir,  "  which  my  wife  should  not  have 
thought  it  necessary  to  ask.  "What,  wouldst  thou  hesitate  or  be 
reluctant  to  restore  to  everyone  his  owrii  ?"  "  No,"  she  replied  ; 
"  but  yet  I  thought  it  best  not  to  restore  them  without  acquaint 
ing  thee  therewith."  She  then  led  him  to  their  chamber,  and 
stepping  to  the  bed,  took  the  white  covering  from  the  dead  bodies. 
"  Ah,  my  sons,  my  sons,"  thus  loudly  lamented  the  father,  "my  sons, 
the  light  of  mine  eyes,  and  the  light  of  my  understanding.  I  was 
your  father,  but  ye  were  my  teachers  in  the  law."  The  mother 
turned  away  and  wrept  bitterly.  At  length  she  took  her  husband 
by  the  hand,  and  said,  "  Rabbi,  didst  thou  not  teach  me  that  we 
must  not  be  reluctant  to  restore  that  which  wras  intrusted  to  our 
keeping  ?  See,  the  Lord  gave,  the  Lord  hath  taken  away,  and 
blessed  be  the  name  of  the  Lord  !"  "  Blessed  be  the  name  of 
the  Lord  !"  echoed  Rabbi  Meir,  "  and  blessed  be  his  name  for 
thy  sake  too  !  For  well  it  is  written  :  Whoso  hath  found  a  vir 
tuous  wife  hath  a  greater  treasure  than  costly  pearls  :  she  open- 
eth  her  mouth  ivith  ivisdmn,  and  in  her  tongue  is  the  law  of 
kindness."* 

CONVERSATION    OF    A    PHILOSOPHER    WITH    A    RABBI. 

"  Your  God  in  his  book  calls  himself  a  jealous  God,  who  can 
endure  no  other  god  beside  himself,  and  on  all  occasions  makes 
manifest  his  abhorrence  of  idolatry.  How  conies  it  then  that  he 
threatens  and  seems  to  hate  the  worshipers  of  false  gods  more 
than  the  false  gods  themselves."  "  A  certain  king,"  replied  the 
Rabbi,  "  had  a  disobedient  son.  Among  other  worthless  tricks 
of  various  kinds,  he  had  the  baseness  to  give  his  dogs  his  father's 
names  and  titles.  Should  the  king  show  his  anger  on  the  prince 
or  the  dogs  ?"  "  "Well  turned,"  rejoined  the  philosopher:  "but 
*  Prov.  xxxi.  26. — Ed. 


ESSAY    IV.  343 

if  your  God  destroyed  the  objects  of  idolatry  he  would  take  away 
the  temptation  to  it."  "  Yea,"  retorted  the  Rabbi,  "  if  the  fools 
worshiped  such  things  only  as  were  of  no  further  use  than  that 
to  which  their  folly  applied  them,  if  the  idol  were  always  as 
worthless  as  the  idolatry  is  contemptible.  But  they  worship  the 
sun,  the  moon,  the  host  of  heaven,  the  rivers,  the  sea,  fire,  air, 
and  what  not  ?  Would  you  that  the  Creator,  for  the  sake  of 
these  fools,  should  ruin  his  own  works,  and  disturb  the  laws  ap 
pointed  to  nature  by  his  own  wisdom  ?  If  a  man  steals  grain 
and  sows  it,  should  the  seed  snot  shoot  up  out  of  the  earth,  be 
cause  it  was  stolen  ?  0  no  !  the  wise  Creator  lets  nature  run 
her  own  course  :  for  her  course  is  his  own  appointment.  And 
what  if  the  children  of  folly  abuse  it  to  evil  ?  The  day  of  reck 
oning  is  not  far  off,  and  men  will  then  learn  that  human  actions 
likewise  re-appear  in  their  consequences  by  as  certain  a  law  as 
the  green  blade  rises  up  out  of  the  buried  corn-seed."^ 

*  See  Pi-oben  Rabbinischer   Weisheit.     Engel's  Schriften,  BcL  I.  s.  297- 
306.— Atn.  Ed* 


THE     FRIEND, 

SECTION  THE  SECOND. 


ON  THE  GROUNDS  OF  MORALS  AND  RELIGION,  AND  THE 

DISCIPLINE  OF  THE  MIND  REQUISITE  FOR  A  TRUE 

UNDERSTANDING  OF  THE  SAME. 


I  know,  the  seeming'  and  self-pleasing  wisdom  of  our  times  consists  much 
in  cavilling  and  unjustly  carping  at  all  things  that  see  light,  and  that  there 
are  many  who  earnestly  hunt  after  the  publike  fame  of  learning  and  judg^ 
ment  by  this  easily  trod  and  despicable  path,  which,  notwithstanding,  they 
tread  with  as  much  confidence  as  folly :  for  that,  oftimes,  which  they  vainly 
and  unjustly  brand  with  opprobrie,  outlives  their  fate,  and  flourisheth  when  it 
is  forgot  that  ever  any  such  as  they  had  being. — Dedication  to  Lord  Herbert 
of  Ambrose  Parey's  Works  by  Thomas  Johnson,  the  Translator,  1634. 


THE    FRIEND. 


INTBODUCTTON. 

llapti,  L^TOV  -  TIJV  Zvvoiav  TOV  Kara  <j>vaiv  £yv,  Kal  TO  ve/uvov  aT 
-  CJ^E  K.o7»a.K.eia<;  p£v  Kaaqg  TrpoatjVE^epav  elvai  rf/v  6/u.Mav  avrov,  aldeai- 
litjrarov  6i;  Trap'  avrov  EKEIVOV  rov  ttaipov  elvai'  Kal  lifta  plv  drradS^arov  elvai, 
ufia  <5£  tyi"ho~opy6rarov'  Kal  TO  idetv  uvdpuirov  aa<pu£  .£%u%i$'ov  TU>V 
jj-yov/jLEvov  rrjv  avTov  Tro%.v[ia6t7]v.  M. 


From  Sextus,  and  from  the  contemplation  of  his  chai'acter,  I  learned 
what  it  was  to  live  a  life  in  harmony  with  nature  ;  and  that  secmliness 
and  dignity  of  deportment,  which  insured  the  profoundest  reverence  at  the 
very  same  time  that  his  company  was  more  winning  than  all  the  flattery 
in  the  world.  To  him  I  owe  likewise  that  I  have  known  a  man  at  once  the 
most  dispassionate,  and  the  most  affectionate,  and  who  of  all  his  attractions 
set  the  least  value  on  the  multiplicity  of  his  literary  acquisitions. 

TO  THE  EDITOR  OF  THE  FRIEND. 
SIR, 

I  hope  you  will  not  ascribe  to  presumption  the  liberty  I  take 
in  addressing  you  on  the  subject  of  your  work.  I  feel  deeply 
interested  in  the  cause  you  have  undertaken  to  support  ;  and  my 
object  in  writing  this  letter  is  to  describe  to  you,  in  part  from  my 
own  feelings,  what  I  conceive  to  be  the  state  of  many  minds, 
which  may  derive  important  advantage  from  your  instructions. 

I  speak,  Sir,  of  those  who,  though  bred  up  under  our  unfavor 
able  system  of  education,  have  yet  held  at  times  some  intercourse 
with  nature,  and  with  those  great  minds  whose  works  have  been 
moulded  by  the  spirit  of  nature  ;  who,  therefore,  when  they  pass 
from  the  seclusion  and  constraint  of  early  study,  bring  with  them 
into  the  new  scene  of  the  world  much  of  the  pure  sensibility 
which  is  the  spring  of  all  that  is  greatly  good  in  thought  and  ac- 

*  L.  I.  9.  But  the  passage  is  made  up  from,  rather  than  found  in,  An 
toninus.  —  Ed. 


348  "'HE    FBIEM. 

i 

tion.  To  such  the  season  of  that  entrance  into  the  world  is  a 
season  of  fearful  importance  ;  not  for  the  seduction  of  its  passions, 
but  of  its  opinions.  "Whatever  be  their  intellectual  powers,  un 
less  extraordinary  circumstances  in  their  lives  have'  been  so  fa 
vorable  to  the  growth  of  meditative  genius,  that  their  speculative 
opinions  must  spring  out  of  their  early  feelings,  their  minds  are 
still  at  the  mercy  of  fortune  :  they  have  no  inward  impulse 
steadily  to  propel  them  :  and  must  trust  to  the  chances  of  the 
world  for  a  guide.  And  such  is  our  present  moral  arid  intellec 
tual  state,  that  these  chances  are  little  else  than  variety  of  dan 
ger.  There  wrill  be  a  thousand  causes  conspiring  to  complete 
the  work  of  a  false  education,  and  by  inclosing  the  mind  on 
every  side  from  the  influences  of  natural  feeling,  to  degrade  its 
inborn  dignity,  and  finally  bring  the  heart  itself  under  subjection 
to  a  corrupted  understanding.  I  am  anxious  to  describe  to  yo-u 
Avhat  I  have  experienced  or  seen  of  the  dispositions  and  feelings, 
that  will  aid  every  other  cause  of  danger,  and  tend  to  lay  the 
mind  open  to  the  infection  of  all  those  falsehoods  in  opinion  and 
sentiment,  which  constitute  the  degeneracy  of  the  age. 

Though  it  would  not  be  difficult  to  prove,  that  the  mind  of 
the  country  is  much  enervated  since  the  days  of  her  strength, 
and  brought  down  from  its  moral  dignity,  it  is  not  yet  so  forlorn 
of  all  good, — there  is  nothing  in  the  face  of  the  times  so  dark 
and  saddening  and  repulsive — as  to  shock  the  first  feelings  of  a 
generous  spirit,  and  drive  it  at  once  to  seek  refuge  in  the  elder 
ages  of  our  greatness.  There  yet  survives  so  much  of  the  char 
acter  bred  up  through  long  years  of  liberty,  danger,  and  glory, 
that  even  what  this  age  produces  bears  traces  of  those  that  are 
past,  and  it  still  yields  enough  of  beautiful,  and  splendid,  and 
bold,  to  captivate  an  ardent  but  untutored  imagination.  And  in 
this  real  excellence  is  the  beginning  of  danger  :  for  it  is  the  first 
spring  of  that  excessive  admiration  of  the  age  which  at  last 
brings  down  to  its  own  level  a  mind  born  above  it.  If  there  ex 
isted  only  the  general  disposition  of  all  who  are  formed  with  a 
high  capacity  for  good,  to  be  rather  credulous  of  excellence  than 
suspiciously  arid  severely  just,  the  error  would  not  be  carried  far  : 
but  there  are,  to  a  young  mind,  in  this  country  and  at  this  time, 
numerous  powerful  causes  concurring  to  inflame  his  disposition, 
till  the  excess  of  the  affection  above  the  worth  of  its  object  is 
beyond  all  computation.  To  trace  these  causes  it  will  be  neces- 


INTRODUCTION.  ,  849 

sary  to  follow  the  history  of  a  pure  and  noble  mind  from  the 
first  moment  of  that  critical  passage  from  seclusion  to  the  world, 
which  changes  all  the  circumstances  of  its  intellectual  existence, 
shows  it  for  the  first  time  the  real  scene  of  living  men,  and  calls 
up  the  new  feeling  of  numerous  relations  by  which  it  is  to  be 
connected  with  them. 

To  the  young  adventurer  in  life,  who  enters  upon  his  course 
with  such  a  mind,  every  thing  seems  made  for  delusion.  He 
comes  with  a  spirit  the  dearest  feelings  and  highest  thoughts  of 
which  have  sprung  up  under  the  influences  of  nature.  He 
transfers  to  the  realities  of  life  the  high  wild  fancies  of  visionary 
boyhood  :  he  brings  with  him  into  ..the  world  the  passions  of 
solitary  and  untamed  imagination,  and  hopes  which  he  has 
learned  from  dreams.  Those  dreams  have  been  of  the  great  and 
wonderful  and  lovely,  of  all  which  in  these  has  yet  been  dis 
closed  to  him  :  his  thoughts  have  dwelt  among  the  wonders  of 
nature,  and  among  the  loftiest  spirits  of  men,  heroes,  and  sages, 
and  saints  ; — those  whose  deeds,  and  thoughts,  and  hopes,  were 
high  above  ordinary  mortality,  have  been  the  familiar  compan 
ions  of  his  soul.  To  love  and  to  admire  has  been  the  joy  of  his 
existence.  Love  and  admiration  are  the  pleasures  he  will  de 
mand  of  the  world.  For  these  he  has  searched  eagerly  into  the 
ages  that  are  gone  ;  but  with  more  ardent  and  peremptory  ex 
pectation  he  requires  them  of  that  in  which  his  own  lot  is  cast : 
for  to  look  on  life  with  hopes  of  happiness  is  a  necessity  of  his 
nature,  and  to  him  there  is  no  happiness  but  such  as  is  sur 
rounded  with  excellence. 

See  first  how  this  spirit  will  affect  his  judgment  of  moral  char 
acter,  in  those  with  whom  chance  may  connect  him  in  the  com 
mon  relations  of  life.  It  is  of  those  with  whom  he  is  to  live, 
that  his  soul  first  demands  this  food  of  her  desires.  From  their 
conversation,  their  looks,  their  actions,  their  lives,  she  asks  for 
excellence.  To  ask  from  all  and  to  ask  in  vain,  would  be  too 
dismal  to  bear  :  it  would  disturb  him  too  deeply  with  doubt  and 
perplexity  and  fear.  In  this  hope,  and  in  the  revolting  of  his 
thoughts  from  the  possibility  of  disappointment,  there  is  a 
preparation  for  self-delusion  :  there  is  an  unconscious  determina 
tion  that  his  soul  shall  be  satisfied  ;  an  obstinate  will  to  find 
good  everywhere.  And  thus  his  first  study  of  mankind  is  a 
continued  effort  to  read  in  them  the  expression  of  his  own  feel- 


350  THE    FRIEND. 

ings.  He  catches  at  every  uncertain  show  and  shadowy  resem 
blance  of  Avhat  he  seeks  ;  and  unsuspicious  in  innocence,  he  is 
first  won  with  those  appearances  of  good  which  are  in  fact  only 
false  pretensions.  But  this  error  is  not  carried  far  :  for  there  is 
a  sort  of  instinct  of  rectitude,  which,  like  the  pressure  of  a  talis 
man  given  to  baffle  the  illusions  of  enchantment,  warns  a  pure 
mind  against  hypocrisy.  There  is  another  delusion  more  diffi 
cult  to  resist  and  more  slowly  dissipated.  It  is  when  he  finds, 
as  he  often  will,  some  of  the  real  features  of  excellence  in  the 
purity  of  their  native  form.  For  then  his  rapid  imagination 
will  gather  round  them  all  the  kindred  features  that  are  wanting 
to,  perfect  beauty  ;  and  make  for  him,  where  he  could  not  find, 
the  moral  creature  of  his  expectation ;  peopling,  even  from  this 
human  world,  his  little  circle  of  affection  with  forms  as  fair  as 
his  heart  desired  for  its  love. 

But  when,  from  the  eminence  of  life  which  he  has  reached, 
he  lifts  up  his  eyes,  and  sends  out  his  spirit  to  range  over  the 
great  scene  that  is  opening  before  him  find  around  him,  the 
whole  prospect  of  civilized  life  so  Avide  and  so  magnificent ; — 
when  he  begins  to  contemplate,  in  their  various  stations  of  power 
or  splendor,  the  leaders  of  mankind,  those  men  on  whose  wisdom 
are  hung  the  fortunes  of  nations,  those  whose  genius  and  valor 
wield  the  heroism  of  a  people ; — or  those,  in  no  inferior  pride  of 
place,  whose  sway  is  over  the  mind  of  society,  chiefs  in  the 
realm  of  imagination,  interpreters  of  the  secrets  of  nature,  rulers 
of  human  opinion ; — what  wonder  when  he  looks  on  all  this  liv 
ing  scene,  that  his  heart  should  burn  with  strong  affection,  that 
he  should  feel  that  his  own  happiness  will  be  forever  interwoven 
with  the  interests  of  mankind  ?  Here  then  the  sanguine  hope 
with  which  he  looks  on  life,  will  again  be  blended  with  his  pas 
sionate  desire  of  excellence  ;  and  he  will  still  be  impelled  to 
single  out  some,  on  whom  his  imagination  and  his  hopes  may 
repose.  To  whatever  department  of  human  thought  or  action 
his  mind  is  turned  with  interest,  either  by  the  sway  of  public 
passion  or  by  its  own  impulse,  among  statesmen,  and  warriors, 
and  philosophers,  and  poets,  he  will  distinguish  some  favored 
names  on  which  he  may  satisfy  his  admiration.  And  there,  just 
as  in  the  little  circle  of  his  own  acquaintance,  seizing  eagerly  on 
every  merit  they  possess,  he  will  supply  more  from  his  own 
credulous  hope,  completing  real  with  imagined  excellence,  till 


INTRODUCTION.  351 

living  men,  with  all  their  imperfections,  become  to  him  the  rep 
resentatives  of  his  perfect  ideal  creation  ; — till,  multiplying  his 
objects  of  reverence,  as  he  enlarges  his  prospect  of  life,  he  will 
have  surrounded  himself  with  idols  of  his  own  hands,  and  his 
imagination  will  seem  to  discern  a  glory  in  the  countenance  of 
the  age,  which  is  but  the  reflection  of  its  own  effulgence . 

He  will  possess,  therefore,  in  the  creative  power  of  generous 
hope,  a  preparation  for  illusory  and  exaggerated  admiration  of 
the  age  in  which  he  lives  :  and  this  predisposition  will  meet  with 
many  favoring  circumstances,  when  he  has  grown  up  under  a 
system  of  education  like  ours,  which  (as  perhaps  all  education 
must  that  is  placed  in.  the  hands  of  a  distinct  and  embodied  class, 
who  therefore  bring  to  it  the  peculiar  and  hereditary  prejudices 
of  their  order)  has  controlled  his  imagination  to  a  reverence  of 
former  times,  with  an  unjust  contempt  of  his  own.  For  no  sooner 
does  he  break  loose  from  this  control,  and  begin  to  feel,  as  he  con 
templates  the  world  for  himself,  how  much  there  is  surrounding 
him  on  all  sides,  that  gratifies  his  noblest  desires,  than  there 
springs  up  in  him  an  indignant  sense  of  injustice,  both  to  the  age 
and  to  his  own  mind ;  arid  he  is  impelled  warmly  and  eagerly  to 
give  loose  to  the  feelings  that  have  been  held  in  bondage,  to  seek 
out  and  to  deJight  in  finding  excellence  that  will  vindicate  the  in 
sulted  world,  while  it- justifies,  too,  his  resentment  of  his  own  un 
due  subjection,  and  exalts  the  value  of  his  new  found  liberty. 

Add  to  this,jthat  secluded  as  he  has  been  from  knowledge,  and, 
in  the  imprisoning  circle  of  one  system  of  ideas,  cut  off  from  his 
share  in  the  thoughts  and  feelings  that  are  stirring  among  men, 
he  finds  himself,  at  the  first  steps  of  his  liberty,  in  a  new  intellec 
tual  world.  Passions  and  powers  which  he  knew  not  of  start  up 
in  his  soul.  The  human  mind,  which  he  had  seen  but  under  one 
aspect,  noV  presents  to  him  a  thousand  unknown  and  beautiful 
forms.  He  sees  it,  in  its  varying  powers,  glancing  over  nature 
with  restless  curiosity,  and  with  impetuous  energy  striving  for 
ever  against  the  barriers  which  she  has  placed  around  it ;  sees  it 
with  divine  power  creating  from  dark  materials  living  beauty, 
and  fixing  all  its  high  and  transported  fancies  in  imperishable 
forms.  In  the  world  of  knowledge,  and  science,  and  art,  and 
genius,  he  treads  as  a  stranger  :  in  the  confusion  of  new  sensa 
tions,  bewildered  in  delights,  all  seems  beautiful  ;  all  seems  ad 
mirable.  And  therefore  he  engages  eagerly  in  the  pursuit  of  false 


352  THE    FRIEND. 

or  insufficient  philosophy  ;  he  is  won  by  the  allurements  of  licen 
tious  art ;  he  follows  with  wonder  the  irregular  transports  of  un 
disciplined  imagination.  Nor,  where  the  objects  of  his  admira 
tion  are  worthy,  is  he  yet  skilful  to  distinguish  between  the  ac 
quisitions  which  the  age  has  made  for  itself,  and  that  large  pro 
portion  of  its  wealth  which  it  has  only  inherited  :  but  in  his  de 
light  of  discovery  and  growing  knowledge,  all  that  is  new  to  his 
own  mind  seems  to  him  newborn  to  the  world.  To  himself  every 
fresh  idea  appears  instruction  ;  every  new  exertion,  acquisition 
of  power :  he  seems  just  called  to  the  consciousness  of  himself, 
and  to  his  true  place  in  the  intellectual  world  ;  and  gratitude  and 
reverence  towards  those  to  whom  he  owes  this  recovery  of  his 
dignity,  tend  much  to  subject  him  to  the  dominion  of  minds  that 
were  not  formed  by  nature  to  be  the  leaders  of  opinion. 

"All  the  tumult  and  glow  of  thought  and  imagination,  which 
seize  on  a  mind  of  power  in  such  a  scene,  tend  irresistibly  to  bind 
it  by  stronger  attachment  of  love  and  admiration  to  its  own  age. 
And  there  is  one^  among  the  new  emotions  which  belong  to  its 
entrance  on  the  world,  one  almost  the  noblest  of  all,  in  which  this 
exaltation  of  the  age  is  essentially  mingled.  The  faith  in  the 
perpetual  progression  of  human  nature  towards  perfection  gives 
birth  to  such  lofty  dreams,  as  secure  to  it  the  devout  assent  of  the 
imagination ;  and  it  will  be  yet  more  grateful  to  a  heart  just 
opening  to  hope,  flushed  with  the  consciousness  of  new  strength, 
and  exulting  in  the  prospect  of  destined  achievements.  There  is, 
therefore,  almost  a  compulsion  on  generous  and  enthusiastic 
spirits,  as  they  trust  that  the  future  shall  transcend  the  present, 
to  believe  that  the  present  transcends  the  past.  .  It  is  only  on  an 
undue  love  and  admiration  of  their  own  age  that  they  can  build 
their  confidence  in  the  melioration  of  the  human  race.  Nor  is 
this  faith,  which,  in  some  shape,  will  always  be  the  creed  of  vir 
tue,  without  apparent  reason,  even  in  the  erroneous  form  in  which 
the  young  adopt  it.  For  there  is  a  perpetual  acquisition  of 
knowledge  and  art,  an  unceasing  progress  in  many  of  the  modes 
of  exertion  of  the  human  mind,  a  perpetual  unfolding  of  virtues 
with  the  changing  manners  of  society  :  and  it  is  not  for  a  young 
mind  to  compare  what  is-  gained  with  what  has  passed  away ;  to 
discern  that  amidst  the  incessant  intellectual  activity  of  the  race, 
the  intellectual  power  of  individual  minds  may  be  falling  off; 
and  that  amidst  accumulating  knowledge  lofty  science  may  dis- 


INTRODUCTION.  353 

appear  ;  and  still  less,  to  judge,  in  the  more  complicated  moral 
character  of  a  people,  what  is  progression,  and  what  is  decline. 

Into  a  mind  possessed  with  this  persuasion  of  the  perpetual 
progress  of  man,  there  may  even  imperceptibly  steal  both  from 
the  belief  itself,  and  from  many  of  the  views  on  which  it  rests, 
something  like  a  distrust  of  the  wisdom  of  great  men  of  former 
ages,  and  with  the  reverence,  which  no  delusion  will  ever  over 
power  in  a  pure  mind,  for  their  greatness,  a  fancied  discernment 
of  imperfection  and  of  incomplete  excellence,  which  wanted  for 
its  accomplishment  the  advantages  of  later  improvements :  there 
will  be  a  surprise  that  so  much  should  have  been  possible  in 
times  so  ill  prepared ;  and  even  the  study  of  their  works  may  be 
sometimes  rather  the  curious  research  of  a  speculative  inquirer, 
than  the  devout  contemplation  of  an  enthusiast, — the  watchful 
and  obedient  heart  of  a  disciple  listening  to  the  inspiration  of  his 
master. 

Here  then  is  the  power  of  delusion  that  will  gather  round  the 
first  steps  of  a  youthful  spirit,  and  throw  enchantment  over  the 
world  in  which  it  is  to  dwell ; — hope  realizing  its  own  dreams ; 
ignorance  dazzled  and  ravished  with  sudden  sunshine  ;  power 
awakened  and  rejoicing  in  its  own  consciousness ;  enthusiasm 
kindling  among  multiplying  images  of  greatness  and  beauty,  and 
enamored,  above  all,  of  one  splendid  error ;  and,  springing  from 
all  these,  such  a  rapture  of  life  and  hope,  and  joy,  that  the  soul, 
in  the  power  of  its  happiness,  transmutes  things  essentially  repug 
nant  to  it,  into  the  excellence  of  its  own  nature  :  these  are  the 
spells  that  cheat  the  eye  of  the  mind  with  illusion.  It  is  under 
these  influences  that  a  young  man  of  ardent  spirit  gives  all  his 
love,  and  reverence,  and  zeal,  to  productions  of  art,  to  theories 
of  science,  to  opinions,  to  systems  of  feeling,  and  to  characters 
distinguished  in  the  world,  that  are  far  beneath  his  own  original 
dignity. 

Now  as  this  delusion  springs  not  from  his  worse  but  his  better 
nature,  it  seems  as  if  there  could  be  no  warning  to  him  from 
within  of  his  danger  :  for  even  the  impassioned  joy  which  he 
draws  at  times  from  the  works  of  nature,  and  from  those  of  her 
mightier  sons,  and  which  would  startle  him  from  a  dream  of  un 
worthy  passion,  serves  only  to  fix  the  infatuation  : — for  those  deep 
emotions,  proving  to  him  that  his  heart  is  uncorrupted,  justify  to 
•him  all  its  workings,  and  his  mind,  confiding  and  delighting  in 


854  THE    FRIEND. 

itself,  yields  to  the  guidance  of  its  own  blind  impulses  of  pleasure. 
His  chance,  therefore,  of  security  is  the  chance  that  the  greater 
number  of  objects  occurring  to  attract  his  honorable  passions 
may  be  worthy  of  them.  But  we  have  seen  that  the  whole 
power  of  circumstances  is  collected  to  gather  round  him  such  ob 
jects  and  influences  as  will  bend  his  high  passions  to  unworthy 
enjoyment.  He  engages  in  it  with  a  heart  and  understanding 
unspoiled  :  but  they  can  not  long  be  misapplied  with  impunity. 
They  are  drawn  gradually  into  closer  sympathy  with  the  false 
hoods  they  have  adopted,  till,  his  very  nature  seeming  to  change 
under  the  corruption,  there  disappears  from  it  the  capacity  of 
those  higher  perceptions  and  pleasures  to  which  he  was  born  : 
and  he  is  cast  off  from  the  communion  of  exalted  minds,  to  live 
and  to"  perish  with  the  age  to  which  he  has  surrendered  himself. 

If  minds  under  these  circumstances  of  danger  are  preserved 
from  decay  and  overthrow,  it  can  seldom.  I  think,  be  to  them 
selves  that  they  owe  their  deliverance.  It  must  be  to  a  fortunate 
chance  which  places  them  under  the  influence  of  some  more  en 
lightened  mind,  from  which  they  may  first  gain  suspicion  and 
afterwards  wisdom.  There  is  a  philosophy,  which,  leading  them 
by  the  light  of  their  best  emotions  to  the  principles  which  should 
give  life  to  thought  and  law  to  genius,  will  discover  to  them  in 
clear  and  perfect  evidence,  the  falsehood  of  the  errors  that  have 
misled  them,  and  restore  them  to  themselves.  And  this  philoso 
phy  they  will  be  willing  to  hear  and  wise  to  understand  ;  but 
they  must  be  led  into  its  mysteries  by  some  guiding  hand  ;  for 
they  want  the  impulse  or  the  power  to  penetrate  of  themselves 
the  recesses. 

If  a  superior  mind  should'  assume  the  protection  of  others  just 
beginning  to  move  among  the  dangers  I  have  described,  it  would 
probably  be  found,  that  delusions  springing  from  their  own  vir 
tuous  activity  were  not  the  only  difficulties  to  be  encountered. 
Even  after  suspicion  is  awakened,  the  subjection  to  falsehood 
may  be  prolonged  and  deepened  by  many  weaknesses  both  of  the 
intellectual  and  moral  nature  ;  weaknesses  that  will  sometimes 
shake  the  authority  of  acknowledged  truth.  There  may  be  intel 
lectual  indolence  ;  an  indisposition  in  the  mind  to  the  effort  of 
combining  the  ideas  it  actually  possesses,  and  bringing  into  dis 
tinct  form  the  knowledge,  which  in  its  elements  is  already  its 
own  :  there  may  be,  where  the  heart  resists  the  sway  of  opinion, 


INTRODUCTION.  355 

misgivings  and  modest  self-mistrust  in  him  who  sees  that,  if  he 
trusts  his  heart,  he  must  slight  the  judgment  of  all  around  him  : 
— there  may  be  too  habitual  yielding  to  authority,  consisting, 
more  than  in  indolence  or  diffidence,  in  a  conscious  helplessness 
and  incapacity  of  the  mind  to  maintain  itself  in  its  own  place 
against  the  weight  of  general  opinion ;  and  there  may  be  too 
indiscriminate,  too  undisciplined,  a  sympathy  with  others,  which 
by  the  mere  infection  of  feeling  will  subdue  the  reason.  There 
must  be  a  weakness  in  dejection  to  him  who  thinks  with  sadness, 
if  his  faith  be  pure,  how  gross  is  the  error  of  the  multitude,  and 
that  multitude  how  vast ; — a  reluctance  to  embrace  a  creed  that 
excludes  so  many  whom  he  loves,  so  many  whom  his  youth  has 
revered  ; — a  difficulty  to  his  understanding  to  believe  that  those 
whom  he  knows  to  be,  in  much  that  is  good  and  honorable,  his 
superiors,  can  be  beneath  him  in  this  which  is  the  most  impor 
tant  of  all ; — a  sympathy  pleading  importunately  at  his  heart  to 
descend  to  the  fellowship  of  his  brothers,  and  to  take  their  faith 
and  wisdom  for  his  own.  How  often,  when  under  the  impulses 
of  those  solemn  hours,  in  which  he  has  felt  with  clearer  insight 
and  deeper  faith  his  sacred  truths,  he  labors  to  win  to  his  own 
belief  those  whom  he  loves,  will  he  be  checked  by  their  indiffer 
ence  or  their  laughter  !  And  will  he  not  bear  back  to  his  medi 
tations  a  painful  and  disheartening  sorrow,  a  gloomy  dlfcontent 
in  that  faith  which  takes  in  but  a  portion  of  those  whom  he 
wishes  to  include  in  all  his  blessings  ?  Will  he  not  be  enfeebled 
by  a  distraction  of  inconsistent  desires,  when  he  feels  so  strongly 
that  the  faith  which  fills  his  heart,  the  circle  within  which  he 
would  embrace  all  he  loves — would  repose  all  his  wishes  and  hopes 
and  enjoyments — is  yet  .incommensurate  with  his  affections? 

Even  when  the  mind,  strong  in  reason  and  just  feeling  united, 
and  relying  on  its  strength,  has  attached  itself  to  truth,  how  much 
is  there  in  the  course  and  accidents  of  life  that  is  forever  silently 
at  work  for  its  degradation.  There  are  pleasures  deemed  harm 
less,  that  lay  asleep  the  recollections  of  innocence  :  there  are  pur 
suits  held  honorable,  or  imposed  by  duty,  that  oppress  the  moral 
spirit :  above  all  there  is  that  perpetual  connection  with  ordinary 
minds  in  the  common  intercourse  of  society ;  that  restless  activity 
of  frivolous  conversation,  where  men  of  all  characters  and  all 
pursuits  mixing  together,  nothing  may  be  talked  of  that  is  not 
of  common  interest  to  all ; — nothing,  therefore,  but  those  obvious 


856  THE    FRIEND. 

thoughts  and  feelings  that  float  over  the  surface  of  things  ;  and 
all  which  is  drawn  from  the  depth  of  nature,  all  which  impas 
sioned  feeling  has  made  original  in  thought,  would  be  misplaced 
and  obtrusive.  The  talent  that  is  allowed  to  show  itself  is  that 
which  can  repay  admiration  by  furnishing  entertainment  ;  and 
the  display  to  which  it  is  invited  is  that  which  flatters  the  vulgar 
pride  of  society,  by  abasing  what  is  too  high  in  excellence  for  its 
sympathy.  A  dangerous  seduction  to  talents,  which  would  make 
language,  given  to  exalt  the  soul  by  the  fervid  expression  of  its 
pure  emotions,  the  instrument  of  its  degradation.  And  even 
when  there  is,  as  in  the  instance  I  have  supposed,  too  much  up 
rightness  to  choose  so  dishonorable  a  triumph,  there  is  a  neces 
sity  of  manners,  by  which  every  one  must  be  controlled  who 
mixes  much  in  society,  not  to  offend  those  with  whom  he  con 
verses  by  his  superiority  ;  and  whatever  be  the  native -spirit  of  a 
mind,  it  is  evident  that  this  perpetual  adaptation  of  itself  to 
others,  this  watchfulness  against  its  own  rising  feelings,  this 
studied  sympathy  with  mediocrity,  must  pollute  and  impoverish 
the  sources  of  its  strength. 

From  much  of  its  own  weakness,  and  from  all  the  errors  of  its 
misleading  activities, *may  generous  youth  be  rescued  by  the  in 
terposition  of  an  enlightened  mind ;  and  in  some  degree  it  may 
be  guarded  by  instruction  against  the  injuries  to  Avhich  it  is  ex 
posed  in  the  world.  His  lot  is  happy  who  owes  this  protection 
to  friendship  ;  who  has  found  in  a  friend  the  watchful  guardian 
of  his  mind.  He  will  not  be  deluded,  having  that  light  to  guide  ; 
he  will  not  slumber  with  that  voice  to  inspire  ;  he  will  not 
be  desponding  or  dejected,  with  that  bosom  to  lean  on.  But 
how  many  must  there  be  whom  Heaven  has  left  unprovided, 
except  in  their  own  strength  ;  who  must  maintain  themsel^M, 
unassisted  and  solitary,  against  their  own  infirmities  and  the  op 
position  of  the  world  !  For  such  there  may  yet  be  a  protector. 
If  a  teacher  should  stand  up  in  their  generation,  conspicuous 
above  the  multitude  in  superior  power,  and  still  more  in  the  as 
sertion  and  proclamation  of  disregarded  truth  ; — to  him,  to  his 
cheering  or  summoning  voice,  all  those  would  turn,  whose  deep 
sensibility  has  been  oppressed  by  the  indifference,  or  misled  by 
the  seduction  of  the  times.  Of  one  such  teacher  who  has  been 
given  to  our  own  age  you  have  described  the  power  when  you 
said,  that  in  his  annunciation  of  truths  he  seemed  to  speak  in 


INTRODUCTION.  357 

thunders.  I  believe  that  mighty  voice  has  not  been  poured  out 
in  vain  ;  that  there  are  hearts  that  have  received  into  their  in 
most  depths  all  its  varying  tones  ;  and  that  even  now,  there  are 
many  to  whom  the  name  of  Wordsworth  calls  up  the  recollection 
of  their  weakness  and  the  consciousness  of  their  strength. 

To  give  to  the  reason  and  eloquence  of  one  man  this  complete 
control  over  the  minds  of  others,  it  is  necessary,  I  think,  that  he 
should  be  born  in  their  own  times.  For  thus  whatever  false 
opinion  of  pre-eminence  is  attached  to  the  age  becomes  at  once  a 
title  of  reverence  to  him  ;  and  when  with  distinguished  powers 
he  sets  himself  apart  from  the  age,  and  above  it,  as  the  teacher 
of  high  but  ill-understood  truths,  he  will  appear  at  once  to  a 
generous  imagination  in  the  dignity  of  one  whose  superior  mind 
outsteps  the  rapid  progress  of  society,  and  will  derive  from  illu 
sion  itself  the  power  to  disperse  illusions.  It  is  probable  too,  that 
he  who  labors  under  the  errors  I  have  described,  might  feel  the 
power  of  truth  in  a  writer  of  another  age,  yet  fail  in  applying  the 
full  force  of  his  principles  to  his  own  times  ;  but  when  he  re 
ceives  them  from  a  living  teacher,  there  is  no  room  for  doubt  or 
misapplication.  It  is  the  errors  of  his  own  generation  that  are 
denounced  ;  and  whatever  authority  he  may  acknowledge  in  the 
instructions  of  his  master,  strikes,  with  inevitable  force,  at  his 
veneration  for  the  opinions  and  characters  of  his  own  times.  And 
finally  there  will  be  gathered  round  a  living  teacher,  who  speaks 
to  the  deeper  soul,  many  feelings  of  human  love  that  will  place 
the  infirmities  of  the  heart  peculiarly  under  his  control ;  at  the 
same  time  that  they  blend  with  and  animate  the  attachment  to 
his  cause.  So  that  there  will  flow  from  him  something  of  the 
peculiar  influence  of  a  friend  :  while  his  doctrines  will  be  em 
braced  and  asserted  and  vindicated  with  the  ardent  zeal  of  a  dis 
ciple,  such  as  can  scarcely  be  carried  back  to  distant  times,  or  con 
nected  with  voices  that  speak  only  from  the  grave. 

I  have  done  what  I  proposed.  I  have  related  to  you  as  much 
as  I  have  had  opportunities  of  knowing  of  the  difficulties  from 
within  and  from  without,  which  may  oppose  the  natural  devel 
opment  of  true  feeling  and  right  opinion  in  a  mind  formed  with 
some  capacity  for  good  ;  and  the  resources  which  such  a  mind 
may  derive  from  an  enlightened  contemporary  writer.  If  what  I 
have  said  be  just,  it  is  certain  that  this  influence  will  be  felt 
more  particularly  in  a  work,  adapted  by  its  mode  of  publication 


358  *  THE    FRIEND. 

to  address  the  feelings  of  the  time,  and  to  bring  to  its  readers  re 
peated  admonition  and  repeated  consolation. 

I  have,  perhaps,  presumed  too  far  in  trespassing  on  your  atten 
tion,  and  in  giving  way  to  my  own  thoughts  ;  but  I  was  unwil 
ling  to  leave  any  thing  unsaid  which  might  induce  you  to  con 
sider  with  favor  the  request  I  was  anxious  to  make,  in  the  name 
of  all  whose  state  of  mind  I  have  described,  that  you  would  at 
times  regard  us  more  particularly  in  your  instructions.  I  can 
not  judge  to  what  degree  it  may  be  in  your  power  to  give  the 
truth  you  teach  a  control  over  understandings  that  have  matured 
their  strength  in  error ;  but  in  our  class  I  am  sure  you  will  have 
docile  learners. 

MATHETES.^ 

The  Friend  might  rest  satisfied  that  his  exertions  thus  far  have 
not  been  wholly  unprofitable,  if  no  other  proof  had  been  given  of 
their  influence,  than  that  of  having  called  forth  the  foregoing 
letter,  with  which  he  has  been  so  much  interested,  that  he  could 
not  deny  himself  the  pleasure  of  communicating  it  to  his  readers. 
In  answer  to  his  correspondent,  it  need  scarcely  here  be  repeated, 
that  one  of  the  main  purposes  of  his  work  is  to  weigh,  honestly 
and  thoughtfully,  the  moral  worth  and  intellectual  power  of  the 
age  in  which  we  live  ;  to  ascertain  our  gain  and  our  loss ;  to 
determine  what  we  are  in  ourselves  positively,  and  what  we  are 
compared  with  our  ancestors ;  and  thus,  and  by  every  other 
means  within  his  power,  to  discover  what  may  be  hoped  for  fu 
ture  times,  what  and  how  lamentable  are  the  evils  to  be  feared, 
and  how  far  there  is  cause  for  fear.  If  this  attempt  should  not 
be  made  wholly  in  vain,  my  ingenious  correspondent,  and  all  who 
are  in  a  state  of  mind  resembling  that  of  which  he  gives  so  lively 
a  picture,  will  be  enabled  more  readily  and  surely  to  distinguish 
false  from  legitimate  objects  of  admiration  :  and  thus  may  the 
personal  errors,  which  he  would  guard  against  be  more  effectually 
prevented  or  removed  by  the  development  of  general  truth  for  a 
general  purpose,  than  by  instructions  specifically  adapted  to  him 
self  or  to  the  class  of  which  he  is  the  able  representative.  There 
is  a  life  and  spirit  in  knowledge  which  we  extract  from  truths 
scattered  for  the  benefit  of  all,  and  which  the  mind  by  its  own 

*  This  letter  was,  as  the  Editor  is  informed,  the  joint  composition  of  the 
present  Professor  Wilson  and  his  friend,  Mr.  Alexander  Blair. — Ed. 


INTRODUCTION.  359 

activity,  has  appropriated  to  itself, — a  life  and  spirit,  which  is 
seldom  found  in  knowledge  communicated  by  formal  and  direct 
precepts,  even  when  they  are  exalted  and  endeared  by  reverence 
and  iove  for  the  teacher. 

Nevertheless,  though  I  trust  that  the  assistance  which  my  cor 
respondent  has  done  me  the  honor  to  request,  will  in  course  of 
time  floAv  naturally  from  my  labors,  in  a  manner  that  will  best 
serve  him,  I  can  not  resist  the  inclination  to  connect,  at  present, 
wiih  his  letter  a  few  remarks  of  direct  application  to  the  subject 
of  it ;  remarks,  I  say, — for  to  such  I  shall  confine  myself, — inde 
pendent  of  the  main  point  out  of  which  his  complaint  and  request 
both  proceed  ;  I  mean  the  assumed  inferiority  of  the  present  age 
in  moral  dignity  and  intellectual  power  to  those  which  have  pre 
ceded  it.     For  if  the  fact  were  true,  that  we  had  even  surpassed 
our  ancestors  in  the  best  of  what  is  good,  the  main  part  of  the 
dangers  and  impediments  which  my  correspondent  has  feelingly 
portrayed,  could  not  cease  to  exist  for  minds  like  his,  nor  indeed 
would  they  be  much  diminished  ;  as  they  arise  out  of  the  consti 
tution  of  things,  from  the  nature  of  youth,  from  the  laws  that 
govern  the  growth  of  the  faculties,  and  from  the  necessary  condi 
tion  of  the  great  body  of  mankind.     Let  us  throw  ourselves  back 
to  the  age  of  Elizabeth,  and  call  up  to  mind  the  heroes,  the  war 
riors,  the  statesmen,  the  poets,  the  divines,  and  the  moral  phi 
losophers,  with  which  the  reign  of  the  virgin  queen  was  illus 
trated.     Or  if  we  be  more  strongly  attracted  by  the  moral  purity 
and  greatness,  and  that  sanctity  of  civil  and  religious  duty,  with 
which  the  tyranny  of  Charles  1.  was  struggled  against,  let  us 
cast  our  eyes,  in  the  hurry  of  admiration,  round  that  circle  of 
glorious  patriots :  but  do  not  let  us  be  persuaded,  that  each  of 
these,  in  his  course  of  discipline,  was  uniformly  helped  forward 
by  those  with  whom  he  associated,  or  by  those  whose  care  it 
was  to  direct  him.     Then,  as  now,  existed  objects  to  which  the 
wisest  attached  undue  importance  ;  then,  as  now,  judgment  was 
misled  by  factions  and  parties,  time  wasted  in  controversies  fruit 
less,  except  as  far  as  they  quickened  the  faculties  ;  then,  as  now, 
minds  were  venerated  or  idolized,  which  owed  their  influence  to 
the  weakness  of  their  contemporaries  rather  than  to  their  own 
power.     Then,  though  great  actions  were  wrought,  and   great 
works  in  literature  and  science  produced,  yet  the  general  taste 
was  capricious,  fantastical,  or  grovelling ;  and  in  this  point,  as 


360  THE    FRIEND. 

in  all  others,  was  youti.  subject  to  delusion,  frequent  in  propor 
tion  to  the  liveliness  of  the  sensibility,  and  strong  as  the  strength 
of  the  imagination.  Every  age  hath  abounded  in  instances  of 
parents,  kindred,  and  friends,  who,  by  indirect  influence  of  exam 
ple,  or  by  positive  injunction  and  exhortation,  have  diverted  or 
discouraged  the  youth,  who,  in  the  simplicity  and  purity  of  na 
ture,  had  determined  to  follow  his  intellectual  genius  through 
good  and  through  evil,  and  had  devoted  himself  to  knowledge,  to 
the  practice  of  virtue  and  the  preservation  of  integrity,  in  slight 
of  temporal  rewards.  Above  all,  have  not  the  common  duties 
and  cares  of  common  life  at  all  times  exposed  men  to*  injury  from 
causes  the  action  of  which  is  the  more  fatal  from  being  silent  and 
unremitting,  and  which,  wherever  it  was  not  jealously  watched 
and  steadily  opposed,  must  have  pressed  upon  and  consumed  the 
diviner  spirit  ? 

There  are  two  errors  into  which  we  easily  slip  when  thinking 
of  past  times.  One  lies  in  forgetting  in  the  excellence  of  what 
remains  the  large  overbalance  of  worthlessness  that  has  been 
swept  away.  Ranging  over  the  wide  tracts  of  antiquity,  the 
situation  of  the  mind  may  be  likened  to  that  of  a  traveller^  in 
some  unpeopled  part  of  America,  wrho  is  attracted  to  the  burial- 
place  of  one  of  the  primitive  inhabitants.  It  is  conspicuous  upon 
an  eminence,  "  a  mount  upon  a  mount  !"  He  digs  into  it,  and 
finds  that  it  contains  the  bones  of  a  man  of  mighty  stature  ;  and 
he  is  tempted  to  give  way  to  a  belief,  that  as  there  were  giants  in 
those  dfays,  so  all  men  were  giants.  But  a  second  and  wiser 
thought  may  suggest  to  him  that  this  tomb  would  never  have 
forced  itself  upon  his  notice,  if  it  had  not  contained  a  body  that 
was  distinguished  from  others, — that  of  a  man  who  had  been  se 
lected  as  a  chieftain  or  ruler  for  the  very  reason  that  he  surpassed 
the  rest  of  his  tribe  in  stature,  and  who  now  lies  thus  conspicu 
ously  inhumed  upon  the  mountain-top,  while  the  bones  of  his 
followers  are  laid  unobtrusively  together  in  their  burrows  upon 
the  plain  below.  The  second  habitual  error  is,  that  in  this  com 
parison  of  ages  we  divide  time  merely  into  past  and  present,  and 
place  these  in  the  balance  to  be  weighed  against  each  other  ;  not 
considering  that  the  present  is  in  our  estimation  not  more  than  a 
period  of  thirty  years,  or  half  a  century  at  most,  and  that  the  past 
is  a  mighty  accumulation  of  many  such  periods,  perhaps  the 
*  See  Ashe's  Travels  in  America 


INTRODUCTION".  361 

whole  of  recorded  time,  or  at  least  the  whole  of  that  portion  of  it 
in  which  our  own  country  has  been  distinguished.  We  may  il 
lustrate  this  by  the  familiar  use  of  the  words  ancient  and  modern, 
when  applied  to  poetry.  What  can  be  more  inconsiderate  or 
unjust  than  to  compare  a  few  existing  writers  with  the  whole 
succession  of  their  progenitors  ?  The  delusion,  from  the  moment 
that  our  thoughts  are  directed  to  it,  seems  too  gross  to  deserve 
mention  ;  yet  men  Avill  talk  for  hours  upon  poetry,  balancing 
against  each  other  the  words  ancient  and  modern,  and  be  uncon 
scious  that  they  have  fallen  into  it. 

These  observations  are  not  made  as  implying  a  dissent  from 
the  belief  of  my  correspondent,  that  the  moral  spirit  and  intel 
lectual  powers  of  this  country  are  declining ;  but  to  guard  against 
unqualified  admiration,  even  in  cases  where  admiration  has  been 
rightly  fixed,  and  to  prevent  that  depression  which  must  neces 
sarily  follow,  where  the  notion  of  the  peculiar  unfavorableness  of 
the  present  times  to  dignity  of  mind  has  been  carried  too  far.  For 
in  proportion  as  we  imagine  obstacles  to  exist  out  of  ourselves  to 
retard  our  progress,  will,  in  fact,  our  progress  be  retarded.  Deem 
ing,  then,  that  in  all  ages  an  ardent  mind  will  be  baffled  and  led 
astray  in  the  manner  under  contemplation,  though  in  various  de 
grees,  I  shall  at  present  content  myself  with  a  few  practical  and 
desultory  comments  upon  some  of  those  general  causes,  to  which 
my  correspondent  justly  attributes  the  errors  in  opinion;  and  the 
lowering  or  deadening  of  sentiment,  to  which  ingenuous  and  as 
piring  youth  is  exposed.  And  first,  for  the  heart-cheering  belief 
in  the  perpetual  progress  of  the  species  towards  a  point  of  unat 
tainable  perfection.  If  the  present  age  do  indeed  transcend  the 
past  in  what  is  most  beneficial  and  honorable,  he  that  perceives 
this,  being  in  no  error,  has  no  cause  for  complaint  ;  but  if  it  be 
not  so,  a  youth  of  genius  might,  it  should  seem,  be  preserved  from 
any  wrong  influence  of  this  faith  by  an  insight  into  a  simple 
truth,  namely,  that  it  is  riot  necessary,  in  order  to  satisfy  the  de 
sires  of  our  nature,  or  to  reconcile  us  to  the  economy  of  provi 
dence,  that  there  should  be  at  all  times  a  continuous  advance  in 
what  is  of  highest  worth.  In  fact  it  is  not,  as  a  writer  of  the 
present  day  has  admirably  observed,  in  the  power  of  fiction  to 
portray  in  words,  or  of  the  imagination  to  conceive  in  spirit,  ac 
tions  or  characters  of  more  exalted  virtue,  than  those  which 
thousands  of  years  ago  have  existed  upon  earth,  as  we  know 

TOL.  II.  Q 


362  THE    FKIEND. 

from  the  records  of  authentic  history.  Such  is  the  inherent  dig 
nity  of  human  nature,  that  there  belong  to  it  sublimities  of  vir 
tues  which  all  men  may  attain,  and  which  no  man  can  tran 
scend  :  and  though  this  be  not  true  in  an  equal  degree  of  intel 
lectual  power,  yet  in  the  persons  of  Plato,  Demosthenes,  and 
Homer,  and  in  those  of  Shakspeare,  Milton,  and  Lord  Bacon, 
were  enshrined  as  much  of  the  divinity  of  intellect  as  the  inhab 
itants  of  this  planet  can  hope  will  ever  take  up  its  abode  among 
them.  But  the  question  is  not  of  the  powrer  or  worth  of  individ 
ual  minds,  but  of  the  general  moral  or  intellectual  merits  of  an 
age,  or  a  people,  or  of  the  human  race.  Be  it  so.  Let  us  allow 
and  believe  that  there  is  a  progress  in  the  species  towards  unat 
tainable  perfection,  or  whether  this  be  so  or  not,  that  it  is  a  ne 
cessity  of  a  good  and  greatly-gifted  nature  to  believe  it ;  surely 
it  does  not  follow  that  this  progress  should  be  constant  "in  those 
virtues  and  intellectual  qualities,  and  in  those  departments  of 
knowledge,  which  in  themselves  absolutely  considered  are  of 
most  value,  things  independent  and  in  their  degree  indispensa 
ble.  The  progress  of  the  species  neither  is  nor  can  be  like  that 

/  of  a  Roman  road  in  a  right  line.  It  may  be  more  justly  com 
pared  to  that  of  a  river,  which,  both  in  its  smaller  reaches  and 
larger  turnings,  is  frequently  forced  back  towards  its  fountains  by 
objects  which  can  not  otherwise  be  eluded  or  overcome  ;  yet  with 
an  accompanying  impulse  that  will  insure  its  advancement  here 
after,  it  is  either  gaining  strength  every  hour,  or  conquering  in 
secret  some  difficulty,  by  a  labor  that  contributes  as  effectually 
to  further  it  in  its  course,  as  when  it  moves  forward  uninter 
rupted  in  a  line,  direct  as  that  of  the  Roman  road  with  which  I 
began  the  comparison. 

It  suffices  to  content  the  mind,  though  there  may  be  an  appa 
rent  stagnation,  or  a  retrograde  movement  in  the  species,  that 
something  is  doing  which  is  necessary  to  be  done,  and  the  effects 
of  which  will  in  due  time  appear  ;  that  something  is  unremit 
tingly  gaining,  either  in  secret  preparation  or  in  open  and  trium 
phant  progress.  But  in  fact  here,  as  everywhere,  we  are  deceived 
by  creations  which  the  mind  is  compelled  to  make  for  itself;  we 
speak  of  the  species  not  as  an  aggregate,  but  as  endued  with  the 
form  and  separate  life  of  an  individual.  But  human  kind, — what 

.J  is  it  else  than  myriads  of  rational  beings  in  various  degrees  obe 
dient  to  their  reason  ;  some  torpid,  some  aspiring  ;  some  in  eager 


INTRODUCTION.  363 

chase  to  the  right  hand,  some  to  the  left ;  these  wasting  down 
their  moral  nature,  and  these  feeding  it  for  immortality  ?  A 
whole  generation  may  appear  even  to  sleep,  or  may  be  exaspe 
rated  with  rage, — they  that  compose  it,  tearing  each  other  to 
pieces  with  more  than  brutal  fury.  It  is  enough  for  complacency 
and  hope,  that  scattered  and  solitary  minds  are  always  laboring 
somewhere  in  the  service  of  truth  and  virtue  ;  and  that  by  the 
sleep  of  the  multitude  the  energy  of  the  multitude  may  be  pre 
pared  ;  and  that  by  the  fury  of  the  people  the  chains  of  the  peo 
ple  may  be  broken.  Happy  moment  was  it  for  England  when 
her  Chaucer,  who  has  rightly  been  called  the  morning-star  of  her 
literature,  appeared  above  the  horizon ;  when  her  WiclifTe,  like 
the  sun,  shot  orient  beams  through  the  night  of  Romish  super 
stition  !  Yet  may  the  darkness  and  the  desolating  hurricane 
which  immediately  followed  in  the  wars  of  York"  and  Lancaster, 
be  deemed  in  their  turn  a  blessing,  with  which  the  land  has 
been  visited. 

May  I  return  to  the  thought  of  progress,  of  accumulation,  of 
increasing  light,  or  of  any  other  image  by  which  it  may  please 
us  to  represent  the  improvement  of  the  species  ?  The  hundred 
years  that  followed  the  usurpation  of  Henry  IV.,  were  a  hurling- 
back  of  the  mind  of  the  country,  a  dilapidation,  an  extinction  ; 
yet  institutions,  laws,  customs,  and  habits,  were  then  broken 
down,  which  would  not  have  been  so  readily,  nor  perhaps  so 
thoroughly  destroyed  by  the  gradual  influence  of  increasing 
knowledge  ;  and  under  the  oppression  of  which,  if  they  had  con 
tinued  to  exist,  the  virtue  and  intellectual  prowess  of  the  suc 
ceeding  century  could  not  have  appeared  at  all,  much  less  could 
they  have  displayed  themselves  with  that  eager  haste,  and  with 
those  beneficent  triumphs,  which  will  to  the  end  of  time  be 
looked  back  upon  with  admiration  and  gratitude. 

If  the  foregoing  obvious  distinctions  be  once  clearly  perceived, 
and  steadily  kept  in  view,  I  do  not  see  why  a  belief  in  the  prog 
ress  of  human  nature  towards  perfection  should  dispose  a  youth 
ful  mind,  however  enthusiastic,  to  an  undue  admiration  of  his 
own  age,  and  thus  tend  to  degrade  that  mind. 

But  let  me  strike  at  once  at  the  root  of  the  evil  complained 
of  in  my  correspondent's  letter.  Protection  from  any  fatal  effect 
of  seductions  and  hindrances  which  opinion  may  throw  in  the 
way  of  pure  and  high-minded  youth,  can  only  be  obtained  with 


364  THE    FKIEND. 

certainty  at  the  same  price  by  which  every  thing  great  and  good 
is  obtained,  namely,  steady  dependence  upon  voluntary  and  self- 
originating  effort,  and  upon  the  practice  of  self-examination,  sin 
cerely  aimed  at  and  rigorously  enforced.  But  how  is  this  to  be 
expected  from  youth  ?  Is  it  not  to  demand  the  fruit  when  the 
blossom  is  barely  put  forth,  and  is  hourly  at  the  mercy  of  frosts 
arid  winds  ?  To  expect  from  youth  these  virtues  and  habits,  in 
that  degree  of  excellence  to  which  in  mature  years  they  may  be 
carried,  would  indeed  be  preposterous.  Yet  has  youth  many 
helps  and  aptitudes  for  the  discharge  of  these  difficult  duties, 
which  are  withdrawn  for  the  most  part  from  the  'more  advanced 
stages  of  life.  For  youth  has  its  own  wealth  and  independence  ; 
it  is  rich  in  health  of  body  and  animal  spirits,  in  its  sensibility  to 
the  impressions  of  the  natural  universe,  in  the  conscious  growth 
of  knowledge,  in  lively  sympathy  and  familiar  communion  with 
the  generous  actions  recorded  in  history,  and  with  the  high  pas 
sions  of  poetry  ;  and,  above  all,  youth  is  rich  in  the  pos 
session  of  time,  and  the  accompanying  consciousness  of  freedom 
and  power.  The  young  man  feels  that  he  stands  at  a  distance 
from  the  season  when  his  harvest  is  to  be  reaped  ;  that  he  has 
leisure  and  may  look  around,  and  may  defer  both  the  choice  and 
the  execution  of  his  purposes.  If  he  makes  an  attempt  and 
shall  fail,  new  hopes  immediately  rush  in,  and  new  promises. 
Hence,  in  the  happy  confidence  of  his  feelings,  and  in  the  elas 
ticity  of  his  spirit,  neither  worldly  ambition,  nor  the  love  of  praise, 
nor  dread  of  censure,  nor  the  necessity  of  worldly  'maintenance, 
nor  any  of  those  causes  which  tempt  or  compel  the  mind  habitu 
ally  to  look  out  of  itself  for  support  ;  neither  these,  nor  the  pas 
sions  of  envy,  fear,  hatred,  despondency,  and  the  rankling  of  dis 
appointed  hopes  (all  which  in  after-life  give  birth  to,  and  regu 
late,  the  efforts  of  men  and  determine  their  opinions),  have  power 
to  preside  over  the  choice  of  the  young,  if  the  disposition  be  not 
naturally  bad,  or  the  circumstances  have  not  been  in  an  uncom 
mon  degree  unfavorable. 

In  contemplation,  then,  of  this  disinterested  and  free  condition 
of  the  youthful  mind,  I  deem  it  in  many  points  peculiarly  capable 
of  searching  into  itself,  and  of  profiting  by  a  few  simple  questions, 
such  as  these  that  follow.  Am  I  chiefly  gratified  by  the  exertion 
of  my  power  from  the  pure  pleasure  of  intellectual  activity,  and 
from  the  knowledge  thereby  acquired  ?  In  other  words,  to  what 


INTRODUCTION.  365 

degree  do  I  value  my  faculties  and  my  attainments  for  their  own 
sakes  ?  or  arc  they  chiefly  prized  by  rne  on  account  of  the  dis 
tinction  which  they  confer,  or  the  superiority  which  they  give 
me  over  others  ?  Am  I  aware  that  immediate  influence  and  a 
general  acknowledgment  of  merit  are  no  necessary  adjuncts  of 
a  successful  adherence  to  study  and  meditation  in  those  depart 
ments  of  knowledge  which  are  of  most  value  to  mankind  ; — that 
a  recompense  of  honors  and  emoluments  is  far  less  to  be  expect 
ed  ;  in  fact,  that  there  is  little  natural  connection  between  them  ? 
Have  I  perceived  this  truth  ;  and,  perceiving  it,  does  the  coun 
tenance  of  philosophy  continue  to  appear  as  bright  and  beautiful 
in  my  eyes  ? — Has  no  haze  bedimmed  it  ?  Has  no  cloud  passed 
over  and  hidden  from  me  that  look  which  was  before  so  encour 
aging  ?  Knowing  that  it  is  my  duty,  and  feeling  that  it  is  i$y 
inclination,  to  mingle  as  a  social  being  with  my  fellow-men  ;  pre 
pared  also  to  submit  cheerfully  to  the  necessity  that  will  prob 
ably  exist  of  relinquishing,  for  the  purpose  of  gaining  a  liveli 
hood,  the  greatest  portion  of  my  time  to  employments  where  I 
shall  have  little  or  no  choice  how  or  when  I  am  to  act ;  have  I, 
at  this  moment,  wrheii  I  stand  as  it  were  upon  the  threshold  of 
the  busy  world,  a  clear  intuition  of  that  pre-eminence  in  which 
virtue  and  truth  (involving  in  this  latter  word  the  sanctities  of 
religion)  sit  enthroned  above  all  denominations  and  dignities 
which,  in  various  degrees  of  exaltation,  rule  over  the  desires  of 
men  ?  Do  I  feel  that,  if  their  solemn  mandates  shall  be  forgot 
ten,  or  disregarded,  or  denied  the  obedience  due  to  them  when 
opposed  to  others,  I  shall  not  only  have  lived  for  no  good  pur 
pose,  but  that  I  shall  have  sacrificed  my  birth-right  as  a  rational 
being  ;  and  that  every  other  acquisition  will  be  a  bane  and  a 
disgrace  to  me  ?  This  is  not  spoken  with  reference  to  such  sac 
rifices  as  present  themselves  to  the  youthful  imagination  in  the 
shape  of  crimes,  acts  by  which  the  conscience  is  violated  ;  such 
a  thought,  I  know,  would  be  recoiled  from  at  once,  not  without 
indignation  ;  but  I  write  in  the  spirit  of  the  ancient  fable  of 
Prodicus,  representing  the  choice  of  Hercules.  Here  is  the  World, 
a  female  figure  approaching  at  the  head  of  a  train  of  willing  or 
giddy  followers  :  her  air  and  deportment  are  at  once  careless,  re 
miss,  self-satisfied,  and  haughty  :  and  there  is  Intellectual  Prow 
ess,  with  a  pale  cheek  and  serene  brow,  leading  in  chains  Truth, 
her  beautiful  and  modest  captive.  The  one  makes  her  salutation 


366  THE    FRIEND. 

with  a  discourse  of  ease,  pleasure,  freedom,  and  domestic  tran 
quillity  ;  or,  if  she  invite  to  labor,  it  is  labor  in  the  busy  and 
beaten  tract,  with  assurance  of  the  complacent  regards  of  parents, 
friends,  arid  of  those  with  whom  we  associate.  The  promise  also 
may  be  upon  her  lip  of  the  huzzas  of  the  multitude,  of  the  smile 
of  kings,  and  the  munificent  rewards  of  senates.  The  other  docs 
not  venture  to  hold  forth  any  of  these  allurements  ;  she  does  not 
conceal  from  him  whom  she  addresses  the  impediments,  the  dis 
appointments,  the  ignorance  and  prejudice  which  her  follower 
will  have  to  encounter,  if  devoted,  when  duty  calls,  to  active  life  ; 
and  if  to  contemplative,  she  lays  nakedly  before  him  a  scheme 
of  solitary  and  unremitting  labor,  a  life  of  entire  neglect  perhaps, 
or  assuredly  a  life  exposed  to  scorn,  insult,  persecution,  and 
hatred  ;  but  cheered  by  encouragement  from  a  grateful  few,  by 
applauding  conscience,  and  by  a  prophetic  anticipation,  perhaps, 
of  fame — a  late,  though  lasting  consequence.  Of  these  two, 
each  in  this  manner  soliciting  you  to  become  her  adherent,  you 
doubt  not  which  to  prefer  ;  but  oh  !  the  thought  of  moment  is 
not  preference,  but  the  degree  of  preference  ;  the  passionate  and 
pure  choice,  the  inward  sense  of  absolute  and  unchangeable  de 
votion. 

I  spoke  of  a  few  simple  questions.  The  question  involved  in 
this  deliberation  is  simple,  but  at  the  same  time  it  is  high  and 
awful  ;  and  I  would  gladly  know  whether  an  answer  can  be  re 
turned  satisfactory  to  the  mind.  We  will  for  a  moment  suppose 
that  it  can  not  ;  that  there  is  a  startling  and  a  hesitation.  Are 
we  then  to-  despond, — to  retire  from  all  contest, — and  to  reconcile 
ourselves  at  once  to  cares  without  a  generous  hope,  and  to  efforts 
in  which  there  is  no  more  moral  life  than  that  which  is  found  in 
the  business  arid  labors  of  the  unfavored  and  unaspiring  many  ? 
No.  But  if  the  inquiry  have  not  been  on  just  grounds  satisfac 
torily  answered,  M-e  may  refer  confidently  our  youth  to  that  na 
ture  of  which  he  deems  himself  an  enthusiastic  follower,  and  one 
who  wishes  to  continue  110  less  faithful  and  enthusiastic.  We 
would  tell  him  that  there  are  paths  which  he  has  not  trodden  ; 
recesses  which  he  has  not  penetrated  ;  that  there  is  a  beauty 
which  he  has  not  seen,  a  pathos  which  he  has  not  felt,  a  sub 
limity  to  which  he  hath  not  been  raised.  If  he  have  trembled 
because  there  has  occasionally  taken  place  in  him  a  lapse  of  which 
he  is  conscious  ;  if  he  foresee  open  or  secret  attacks,  which  he  has 


INTRODUCTION.  367 

had  intimations  that  he  will  neither  be  strong  enough  .to  resist, 
nor  watchful  enough  to  elude,  let  him  not  hastily  ascribe  this 
weakness,  this  deficiency,  and  the  painful  apprehensions  accom 
panying  them,  in  any  degree  to  the  virtues  or  noble  qualities  with 
which  youth  by  nature  is  furnished  ;  but  let  him  first  be  assured, 
before  he  looks  about  for  the  means  of  attaining  the  insight,  the 
discriminating  powers,  and  the  confirmed  wisdom  of  manhood, 
that  his  soul  has  more  to  demand  of  the  appropriate  excellencies 
of  youth,  than  youth  has  yet  supplied  to  it ;  that  the,  evil  under 
which  he  labors  is  not  a  superabundance  of  the  instincts  and  the 
animating  spirit  of  that  age,  but  a  falling  short,  or  a  failure. 
But  what  can  he  gain  from  this  admonition  ?  He  can  not  recall 
past  time  ;  he  can  not  begin  his  journey  afresh  ;  he  can  not  un 
twist  the  links  by  which,  in  no  undelightful  harmony,  images  and 
sentiments  are  wedded  in  his  mind.  Granted  that  the  sacred 
light  of  childhood  is  and  must  be  for  him  no  more  than  a  remem 
brance.  He  may,  notwithstanding,  be  remanded  to  nature,  and 
with  trustworthy  hopes,  founded  less  upon  his  sentient  than  upon 
his  intellectual  being ;  to  nature,  as  leading  on  insensibly  to  the 
society  of  reason,  but  to  reason  and  will,  as  leading  back  to  the 
wisdom  of  nature.  A.  re-union,  in  this  order  accomplished,  will 
bring  reformation  and  timely  support ;  and  the  two  powers  of 
reason  and  nature,  thus  reciprocally  teacher  and  taught,  may  ad 
vance  together  in  a  track  to  which  there  is  no  limit. 
•  We  have  been  discoursing  (by  implication  at  least)  t)f  infancy, 
childhood,  boyhood,  and  youth,  of  pleasures  lying  upon  the  un 
folding  intellect  plenteously  as  morning  dew-drops, — of  knowledge 
inhaled  insensibly  like  the  fragrance, — of  dispositions  stealing  into 
the  spirit  like  music  from  unknown  quarters, — of  images  uncalled 
for  and  rising  up  like  exhalations, — of  hopes  plucked  like  beauti 
ful  wild  flowers  from  the  ruined  tombs  that  border  the  highways 
of  antiquity,  to  make  a  garland  for  a  living  forehead  ; — in  a 
word,  we  have  been  treating  of  nature  as  a  teacher  of  truth 
through  joy  and  through  gladness,  and  as  a  creatress  of  the  facul 
ties  by  a  process  of  smoothness  and  delight.  We  have  made  no 
mention  of  fear,  shame,  sorrow,  nor  of  ungovernable  and  vexing 
thoughts  ;  because,  although  these  have  been  and  have  done 
mighty  service,  they  are  overlooked  in  that  stage  of  life  when 
youth  is  passing  into  manhood — overlooked,  or  forgotten.  We 
now  apply  for  the  succor  which  we  need  to  a  faculty  that  works 


368  THE    FRIEND. 

after  a  different  course  ;  that  faculty  is  reason  ;  she  gives  more 
spontaneously,  but  she  seeks  for  more ;  she  works  by  thought 
through  feeling  ;  yet  in  thoughts  she  begins  and  ends. 

A  familiar  incident  may  elucidate  this  contrast  in  the  opera 
tions  of  nature,  may  render  plain  the  manner  in  which  a  process 
of  intellectual  improvements,  the  reverse  of  that  which  nature 
pursues,  is  by  reason  introduced.  There  never  perhaps  existed  a 
school-boy,  who,  having,  when  he  retired  to  rest,  carelessly  blown 
out  his  candle,  and  having  chanced  to  notice,  as  he  lay  upon  his 
bed  in  the  ensuing  darkness,  the  sullen  light  wrhich  had  survived 
the  extinguished  flame, -did  not,  at  some  time  or  other,  watch 
that  light  as  if  his  mind  Avere  bound  to  it  by  a  spell.  It  fades 
and  revives,  gathers  to  a  point,  seems  as  if  it  would  go  out  in  a 
moment,  again  recovers  its  strength,  nay  becomes  brighter  than 
before  :  it  continues  to  shine  with  an  endurance,  which  in  its 
apparent  weakness  is  a  mystery  ;  it  protracts  its  existence  so 
long,  clinging  to  the  power  which  supports  it,  that  the  observer, 
who  had  lain  down  in  his  bed  so  easy- minded,  becomes  sad  and 
melancholy  ;  his  sympathies  are  touched  ;  it  is  to  him  an  intima 
tion  and  an  image  of  departing  human  life  ;  the  thought  comes 
nearer  to  him ;  it  is  the  life  of  a  venerated  parent,  of  a  beloved 
brother  or  sister,  or  of  an  aged  domestic,  who  are  gone  to  the 
grave,  or  whose  destiny  it  soon  may  be  thus  to  linger,  thus  to 
hang  upon  the  last  point  of  mortal  existence,  thus  finally  to  de 
part  and  be  seen  no  more.  This  is  nature  teaching  seriously  and 
sweetly  through  the  affections,  melting  the  heart,  and,  through 
that  instinct  of  tenderness,  developing  the  understanding.  In 
this  instance  the  object  of  solicitude  is  the  bodily  life  of  another. 
Let  us  accompany  this  same  boy  to  that  period  between  youth 
and  manhood,  when  a  solicitude  may  be  awakened  for  the  moral 
life  of  himself.  Are  there  any  powers  by  which,  beginning  with 
a  sense  of  inward  decay  that  affects  not  however  the  natural  life, 
he  could  call  to  mind  the  same  image  and  hang  over  it  with  an 
equal  interest  as  a  visible  type  of  his  own  perishing  spirit  ?  Oh  ! 
surely,  if  the  being  of  the  individual  be  under  his  own  care,  if  it 
be  his  first  care,  if  duty  begin  from  the  point  of  accountableness 
to  our  conscience,  and,  through  that,  to  God  and  human  nature  ; 
if  without  such  primary  sense  of  duty,  all  secondary  care  of 
teacher,  of  friend,  or  parent,  must  be  baseless  and  fruitless ;  if, 
lastly,  the  motions  of  the  soul  transcend  in  worth  those  of  the 


INTRODUCTION.  369 

animal  functions,  nay,  give  to  them  their  sole  value  ;  then  truly 
are  there  such  powers  ;  and  the  image  of  the  dying  taper  maybe 
recalled  and  contemplated,  though  with  no  sadness  in  the  nerves, 
no  disposition  to  tears,  no  unconquerable  sighs,  yet  with  a  melan 
choly  in  the  soul,  a  sinking  inward  into  ourselves  from  thought  to 
thought,  a  steady  remonstrance,  and  a  high  resolve.  Let  then 
the  youth  go  back,  as  occasion  will  permit,  to  nature  and  to  soli 
tude,  thus  admonished  by  reason,  and  relying  upon  this  newly 
acquired  support.  A  world  of  fresh  sensations  will  gradually 
open  upon  him  as  his  mind  puts  off  its  infirmities,  and  as  instead 
of  being  propelled  restlessly  towards  others  in  admiration,  or  too 
hasty  love,  he  makes  it  his  prime  business  to  understand  himself. 
New  sensations,  I  affirm,  will  be  opened  out,  pure,  and  sanctioned 
by  that  reason  which  is  their  original  author  ;  and  precious  feel 
ings  of  disinterested,  that  is  self-disregarding,  joy  and  love  may 
be  regenerated  and  restored  ;  and,  in  this  sense,  he  may  be  said 
to  measure  back  the  track  of  life  he  has  trodden. 

In  such  disposition  of  mind  let  the  youth  return  to  the  visible 
universe,  and  to  conversation  with  ancient  books,  and  to  those, 
if  such  there  be,  which  in  the  present  day  breathe  the  ancient 
spirit ;  and  let  him  feed  upon  that  beauty  which  unfolds  itself, 
not  to  his  eye  as  it  sees  carelessly  the  things  which  can  not  possi 
bly  go  unseen,  and  are  remembered  or  not  as  accident  shall  de 
cide,  but  to  the  thinking  mind,  which  searches,  discovers,  and 
treasures  up,  infusing  by  meditation  into  the  objects  with  which 
it  converses  an  intellectual  life,  whereby  they  remain  planted  in 
the  memory,  now  and  forever.  Hitherto  the  youth,  I  suppose, 
has  been  content  for  the  most  part  to  look  at  his  own  mind,  after 
the  manner  in  which  he  ranges  along  the  stars  in  the  firmament 
with  naked  unaided  sight :  let  him  now  apply  the  telescope  of 
art,  to  call  the  invisible  stars  out  of  their  hiding-places  ;  and  let 
him  endeavor  to  look  through  the  system  of  his  being,  with  the 
organ  of  reason,  summoned  to  penetrate,  as  far  as  it  has  power, 
in  discovery  of  the  impelling  forces  and  the  governing  laws. 

These  expectations  are  not  immoderate  ;  they  demand  nothing 
more  than  the  perception  of  a  few  plain  truths  ;  namely,  that 
knowledge,  efficacious  for  the  production  of  virtue,  is  the  ultimate 
end  of  all  effort,  the  sole  dispenser  of  complacency  and  repose 
A  perception  also  is  implied  of  the  inherent  superiority  of  con 
templation  to  action.  The  Friend  does  not  in  this  contradict  his 

Q* 


870  THE    FRIEND. 

own  words,  where  he  has  said  heretofore,  that  '  doubtless  to  act 
is  nobler  than  to  think.'*  In  those  words,  it  was  his  purpose  to 
censure  that  barren  contemplation,  which  rests  satisfied  with 
itself  in  cases  where  the  thoughts  are  of  such  quality  that  they 
may,  and  ought  to,  be  embodied  in  action.  But  he  speaks  now 
of  the  general  superiority  of  thought  to  action  ;  as  proceeding 
and  governing  all  action  that  moves  to  salutary  purposes  ;  and, 
secondly,  as  leading  to  elevation,  the  absolute  possession  of  the 
individual  mind,  and  to  a  consistency  or  harmony  of  the  being 
within  itself,  which  no  outward  agency  can  reach  to  disturb  or 
to  impair  ;  and  lastly,  as  producing  works  of  pure  science  ;  or  of 
the  combined  faculties  of  imagination,  feeling,  and  reason ;  works 
which,  both  from  their  independence  in  their  origin  upon  acci 
dent,  their  nature,  their  duration,  and  the  wide  spread  of  their 
influence,  are  entitled  rightly  to  take  place  of  the  noblest  and  most 
beneficent  deeds  of  heroes,  statesmen,  legislators,  or  warriors. 

Yet,  beginning  from  the  perception  of  this  established  superior 
ity,  we  do  not  suppose  that  the  youth,  wrhom  we  wish  to  guide 
and  encourage,  is  to  be  insensible  to  those  influences  of  wealth, 
or  rank,  or  station,  by  which  the  bulk  of  mankind  are  swayed. 
Our  eyes  have  not  been  fixed  upon  virtue  which  lies  apart  from 
human  nature,  or  transcends  it.  In  fact  there  is  no  such  virtue. 
"We  neither  suppose  nor  wish  him  to  undervalue  or  slight  these 
distinctions  as  modes  of  power,  things  that  may  enable  him  to  be 
more  useful  to  his  contemporaries  ;  nor  as  gratifications  that  may 
confer  dignity  upon  his  living  person,  and,  through  him,  upon 
those  who  love  him  ;  nor  as  they  may  connect  his  name,  through 
a  family  to  be  founded  by  his  success,  in  a  closer  chain  of  grati 
tude  with  some  portion  of  posterity,  who  shall  speak  of  him  as 
among  their  ancestry,  with  a  more  tender  interest  than  the  mere 
general  bond  of  patriotism  or  humanity  would  supply.  We  sup 
pose  no  indifference  to,  much  less  a  contempt  of,  these  rewards ; 
but  let  them  have  their  due  place  ;  let  it  be  ascertained,  when 
the  soul  is  searched  into,  that  they  are  only  an  auxiliary  motive 
to  exertion,  never  the  principal  or  originating  force.  If.  this  be 
too  much  to  expect  from  a  youth  who,  I  take  for  granted,  pos 
sesses  no  ordinary  endowments,  and  whom  circumstances  with 
respect  to  the  more  dangerous  passions  have  favored,  then,  indeed, 
must  the  noble  spirit  of  the  country  be  wasted  away ;  then  would 
*  Ante,  p.  172.— Ed. 


INTRODUCTION,  871 

our  institutions  be  deplorable,  and  the  education  prevalent  among 
us  utterly  vile  and  debasing1. 

But  my  correspondent,  who  drew  forth  these  thoughts,  has  said 
rightly,  that  the  character  of  the  age  may  not  without  injustice 
be  thus  branded.  He  will  not  deny  that,  without  speaking  of 
other  countries,  there  is  in  these  islands,  in  the  departments  of 
natural  philosophy,  of  mechanic  ingenuity,  in  the  general  activi 
ties  of  the  country,  and  in  the  particular  excellence  of  individual 
minds,  in  high  stations  civil  or  military,  enough  to  excite  admira 
tion  and  love  in  the  sober-minded,  and  more  than  enough  to  in 
toxicate  the  youthful  and  inexperienced.  I  will  compare,  then, 
an  aspiring  youth,  leaving  the  schools  in  which  he  has  been 
disciplined,  and  preparing  to  bear  a  part  in  the  concerns  of  the 
world,  I  will  compare  him  in  this  season,  of  eager  admiration,  to 
a  newly-invested  knight  appearing  with  his  blank  unsignalized 
shield,  upon  some  day  of  solemn  tournament,  at  the  court  of  the 
Faery-queen,  as  that  sovereignty  wras  conceived  to  exist  by  the 
moral  and  imaginative  genius  of  our  divine  Spenser.  He  does 
not  himself  immediately  enter  the  lists  as  a  combatant ;  but  he 
looks  round  him  with  a  beating  heart,  dazzled  by  the  gorgeous 
pageantry,  the  banners,  the  impresses,  the  ladies  of  overcoming 
beauty,  the  persons  of  the  knights,  now  first  seen  by  him,  the 
fame  of  whose  actions  is  carried  by  the  traveller,  like  merchan 
dise,  through  the  world,  and  resounded  upon  the  harp  of  the 
minstrel.  But  I  am  not  at  liberty  to  make  this  comparison.  If 
a  youth  Mrere  to  begin  his  career  in  such  an  assemblage,  with 
such  examples  to  guide  and  to  animate,  it  will  be  pleaded,  there 
would  be  no  cause  for  apprehension  ;  he  could  not  falter,  he  could 
not  be  misled.  But  ours  is,  notwithstanding  its  manifold  excel 
lences,  a  degenerate  age  ;  and  recreant  knights  are  among  us  far 
outnumbering  the  true.  A  false  Grloriaria  in  these  days  imposes 
worthless  services,  which  they  who  perform  them,  in  their  blind 
ness,  know  not  to  be  such ;  and  which  are  recompensed  by  re 
wards  as  worthless,  yet  eagerly  grasped  at,  as  if  they  were  the 
immortal  guerdon  of  virtue. 

I  have  in  this  declaration  insensibly  overstepped  the  limits 
which  I  had  determined  not  to  pass  :  let  me  be  forgiven  ;  for  it 
is  hope  which  hath  carried  rne  forward.  In  such  a  mixed  as 
semblage  as  our  age  presents,  with  its  genuine  merit  and  its 
largo  overbalance  of  alloy,  I  may  boldly  ask  into  what  errors, 


372  THE    FRIEND. 

either  with  respect  to  person  or  thing,  could  a  young"  man  fall, 
who  had  sincerely  entered  upon  the  course  of  moral  discipline 
which  has  been  recommended,  and  to  which  the  condition  of 
youth,  it  has  been  proved,  is  favorable  ?  His  opinions  could  no 
where  deceive  him  beyond  the  point  up  to  which,  after  a  season, 
he  would  find  that  it  was  salutary  for  him  to  have  be'en  deceived. 
For  as  that  man  can  not  set  a  right  value  upon  health  who  has 
never  known  sickness,  nor  feel  the  blessing  of  ease  who  has  been 
through  his  life  a  stranger  to  pain,  so  can  there  be  no  confirmed 
and  passionate  love  of  truth  for  him  who  has  not  experienced  the 
hollowness  of  error.  Range  against  each  other  as  advocates,  op 
pose  as  combatants,  two  several  intellects,  each  strenuously  as 
serting  doctrines  which  he  sincerely  believes ;  but  the  one  con 
tending  for  the  worth  and  beauty  of  that  garment  which  the 
other  has  outgrown  and  cast  away.  Mark  the  superiority,  the 
ease,  the  dignity,  on  the  side  of  the  more  advanced  mind,  how 
he  overlooks  his  subject,  commands  it  from  centre  to  circumfer 
ence,  and  hath  the  same  thorough  knowledge  of  the  tenets  which 
his  adversary,  with  impetuous  zeal,  but  in  confusion  also,  and 
thrown  off  his  guard  at  every  turn  of  the  argument,  is  laboring 
to  maintain.  If  it  beji ,  ^uestiou-jof .. the_fine  arts  (jxjetry  for  in 
stance)  the  riper  mind  not  only  sees  that  his  opponent  is  de 
ceived  ;  but,  what  is  of  far  more  importance,  sees  how  he  is  de 
ceived.  The  imagination  stands  before  him  with  all  its  imper 
fections  laid  open  ;  as  duped  by  shows,  enslaved  by  words,  cor 
rupted  by  mistaken  delicacy  and  false  refinement,  as  not  having 
even  attended  with  care  to  the  reports  of  the  senses,  and  there 
fore  deficient  grossly  in  the  rudiments  of  its  own  power.  He  has 
noted  how,  as  a  supposed  necessary  condition,  the  understanding 
sleeps  in  order  that  the  fancy  may  dream.  Studied  in  the  history 
of  society,  and  versed  in  the  secret  laws  of  thought,  he  can  pass 
regularly  through  all  the  gradations,  can  pierce  infallibly  all  the 
windings,  which  false  taste  through  ages  has  pursued,  from  the 
very  time  when  first,  through  inexperience,  heedlessness,  or  af 
fectation,  the  imagination  took  its  departure  from  the  side  of 
truth,  its  original  parent.  Can  a  disputant  thus  accoutred  be 
withstood  ? — one  to  whom,  further,  every  movement  in  the 
thoughts  of  his  antagonist  is  revealed  by  the  light  of  his  own  ex 
perience  ;  who,  therefore,  sympathizes  with  weakness  gently,  and 
wins  his  way  by  forbearance ;  and  hath,  when  needful,  an  irre- 


INTRODUCTION.  373 

sistible  power  of  onset,  arising  from  gratitude  to  the  truth  which 
he  vindicates,  not  merely  as  a  positive  good  for  mankind,  but  as 
his  own  especial  rescue  and  redemption. 

I  might  here  conclude  :  hut  my  correspondent  towards  the  close 
of  his  letter,  has  written  so  feelingly  upon  the  advantages  to  he 
derived,  in  his  estimation,  from  a  living  instructor,  that  I  must 
not  leave  this  part  of  the  subject  without  a  word  of  direct  notice. 
The  Friend  cited,  some  time  ago,*  a  passage  from  the  prose 
works  of  Milton,  eloquently  describing  the  manner  in  which  good 
and  evil  grow  up  together  in  the  field  of  the  world  almost  in 
separably  ;  and  insisting,  consequently,  upon  the  knowledge  and 
survey  of  vice  as  necessary  to  the  constituting  of  human  virtue, 
and  the  scanning  of  error  to  the  confirmation  of  truth. 

If  this  be  so,  and  I  have  been  reasoning  to  the  same  effect  in 
the  preceding  paragraph,  the  fact,  and  the  thoughts  which  it 
may  suggest,  will,  if  rightly  applied,  tend  to  moderate  an  anxiety 
for  the  guidance  of  a  more  experienced  or  superior  mind.  The 
advantage,  where  it  is  possessed,  is  far  from  being  an  absolute 
good  :  nay,  such  a  preceptor,  ever  at  hand,  might  prove  an  op 
pression  not  to  be  thrown  off,  and  a  fatal  hindrance.  Grant  that 
in  the  general  tenor  of  his  intercourse  with  his  pupil  he  is  for 
bearing  and  circumspect,  inasmuch  as  he  is  rich  in  that  knowl 
edge  (above  all  other  necessary  for  a  teacher)  which  can  not  ex 
ist  without  a  liveliness  of  memory,  preserving  for  him  an  un 
broken  image  of  the  winding,  excursive,  and  often  retrograde 
course,  along  which  his  own  intellect  has  passed.  Grant  that, 
furnished  with  these  distinct  remembrances,  he  wishes  that  the 
mind  of  his  pupil  should.be  free  to  luxuriate  in  the  enjoyments, 
loves,  and  admirations  appropriated  to  its  age  ;  that  he  is  not  in 
haste  to  kill  what  he  knows  will  in  due  time  die  of  itself;  or  be 
transmuted,  and  put  on  a  nobler  form  and  higher  faculties  other 
wise  unattainable.  In  a  word,  that  the  teacher  is  governed  ha 
bitually  by  the  wisdom  of  patience  waiting  with  pleasure.  Yet 
perceiving  how  much  the  outward  help  of  art  can  facilitate  the 
progress  of  nature,  he  may  be  betrayed  into  many  unnecessary  or 
pernicious  mistakes  where  he  deems  his  interference  warranted, 
by  substantial  experience.  And  in  spite  of  all  his  caution,  re 
marks  may  drop  insensibly  from  him  which  shall  wither  in  the 
mind  of  his  pupil  a  generous  sympathy,  destroy  a  sentiment  of 
*  Ante,  p.  77.— Ed. 


374  THE    FRIEXD. 

approbation  or  dislike,  not  merely  innocent  but  salutary ;  and  for 
the  inexperienced  disciple  how  many  pleasures  may  be  thus  cut 
off,  what  joy,  what  admiration,  and  what  love  !  While  in  their 
stead  are  introduced  into  the  ingenuous  mind  misgivings,  a  mis 
trust  of  its  own  evidence,  dispositions  to  affect  to  feel  where  there 
can  be  no  real  feeling,  indecisive  judgments,  a  superstructure  of 
opinions  that  has  no  base  to  support  it,  and  words  uttered  by  rote 
with  the  impertinence  of  a  parrot  or  a  mocking-bird,  yet  which 
may  not  be  listened  to  with  the  same  indifference,  as  they  can 
not  be  heard  without  some  feeling  of  moral  disapprobation. 

These  results,  I  contend,  whatever  may  be  the  benefit  to  be 
derived  from  such  an  enlightened  teacher,  are  in  their  degree  in 
evitable.  And  by  this  process,  humility  and  docile  dispositions 
may  exist  towards  the  master,  endued  as  he  is  with  the  power 
which  personal  preference  confers ;  but  at  the  same  time  they 
will  be  liable  to  overstep  their  due  bounds,  and  to  degenerate 
into  passiveness  and  prostration  of  mind.  This  towards  him  ; 
while,  with  respect  to  other  living  men,  nay  even  to  the  mighty 
spirits  of  past  times,  there  may  be  associated  with  such  weak 
ness  a  want  of  modesty  and  humility.  Insensibly  may  steal  in 
presumption  and  a  habit  of  sitting  in  judgment  in  cases  where 
no  sentiment  ought  to  have  existed  by  diffidence  or  veneration. 
Such  virtues  are  the  sacred  attributes  of  youth  ;  its  appropriate 
calling  is  riot  to  distinguish  in  the  fear  of  being  deceived  or  de 
graded,  riot  to  analyze  with  scrupulous  minuteness,  but  to  accu 
mulate  in  genial  confidence  ;  its  instinct,  its  safety,  its  benefit, 
its  glory,  is  to  love,  to  admire,  to  feel,  and  to  labor.  Nature  has 
irrevocably  decreed,  that  our  prime  dependence  in  all  stages  of 
life  after  infancy  and  childhood  have  been  passed  through  (nor  do 
I  know  that  this  latter  ought  to  be  excepted)  must  be  upon  our 
own  minds  ;  and  that  the  way  to  knowledge  shall  be  long,  diffi 
cult,  winding,  and  oftentimes  returning  upon  itself. 

What  has  been  said  is  a  mere  sketch,  and  that  only  of  a  part 
of  the  interesting  country  into  which  we  have  been  led  ;  but 
my  correspondent  will  be  able  to  enter  the  paths  that  have  been 
pointed  out.  Should  he  do  this  and  advance  steadily  for  a  wrhile, 
he  needs'  not  fear  any  deviations  from  the  truth  which  will  be 
finally  injurious  to  him.  He  will  not  long  have  his  admiration 
fixed  upon  unworthy  objects  ;  he  will  neither  be  clogged  nor 
drawn  aside  by  the  love  of  friends  or  kindred,  betraying  his  un- 


INTRODUCTION.  375 

derstanding  through  his  affections  ;  he  will  neither  be  bowed 
down  by  conventional  arrangements  of  manners  producing  too 
often  a  lifeless  decency  ;  nor  will  the  rock  of  his  spirit  wear 
away  in  the  endless  beating  of  the  waves  of  the  world  ;  neither 
will  that  portion  of  his  own  time,  which  he  must  surrender  to 
labors  by  which  his  livelihood  is  to  be  earned  or  his  social  duties 
performed,  be  unprofitable  to  himself  indirectly,  while  it  is 
directly  useful  to  others  ;  for  that  time  has  been  primarily  sur 
rendered  through  an  act  of  obedience  to  a  moral  law  established 
by  himself,  and  therefore  he  moves  then  also  along  the  orbit  of 
perfect  liberty. 

Let  it  be  remembered,  that  the  advice  requested  does  not  re 
late  to  the  government  of  the  more  dangerous  passions,  or  to  the 
fundamental  principles  of  right  and  wrong  as  acknowledged  by 
the  universal  conscience  of  mankind.  I  may  therefore  assure 
my  youthful  correspondent,  if  he  will  endeavor  to  look  into  him 
self  in  the  manner  which  I  have  exhorted  him  to  do,  that  in  him 
the  wish  will  be  realized,  to  him  in  due  time  the  prayer  granted, 
which  was  uttered  by  that  living  teacher  of  whom  he  speaks 
with  gratitude  as  of  a  benefactor,  when  in  his  character  of  philo 
sophical  poet,  having  thought  of  morality  as  implying  in  its  es 
sence  voluntary  obedience,  and  producing  the  eflect  of  order,  he 
transfers  in  the  transport  of  imagination,  the  law  of  moral  to 
physical  natures,  and  having  contemplated,  through  the  medium 
of  .that  order,  all  modes  of  existence  as  subservient  to  one  spirit, 
concludes  his  address  to  the  power  of  duty  in  the  following 
words  : 

To  humbler  functions,  awful  power  ! 

I  call  thee  :  I  myself  commend 

Unto  thy  guidance  from  this  hour  ; 

Oh,  let  my  weakness  have  an  end  ! 

Give  unto  me,  made  lowly  wise, 

The  spirit  of  self-sacrifice  ; 

The  confidence  of  reason  give, 

And  in  the  light  of  truth  thy  bondman  let  me  live  !* 


This  reply  to  Mathetes  was  written  by  Mr.  Wordsworth. — Ed. 


THE    FRIEND, 


ESSAY  I. 

We  can  not  but  look  up  with  reverence  to  the  advanced  natures  of  the 
naturalists  and  moralists  in  highest  repute  amongst  us,  and  wish  they  had 
been  heightened  by  a  more  noble  principle,  which  had  crowned  all  their  va 
rious  sciences  with  the  principal  science,  and  in  their  brave  strayings  after 
truth  helpt  them  to  better  fortune  than  only  to  meet  with  her  handmaids, 
and  kept  them  from  the  fate  of  Ulysses,  who  wandering  through  the  shades 
met  all  the  ghosts,  yet  could  not  see  the  queen. — /.  H.  (JOHN  HALL?)  his 
Motion  to  the  Parliament  of  England  concerning  the  Advancement  of 
Learning. 

THE  preceding  section,  ending  with  the  second  Landing  Place, 
had  for  its  express  object  the  principles  of  our  duty  as  citizens,  or 
morality  as  applied  to  politics.  According  to  his  scheme  there  re 
mained  for  The  Friend  first,  to  treat  of  the  principles  of  morality 
generally,  and  then  of  those  of  religion.  But  since  the  commence 
ment  of  this  edition,*  the  question  has  repeatedly  arisen  in  my 
mind,  whether  morality  can  be  said  to  have  any  principle  distin 
guishable  from  religion,  or  religion  any  substance  divisible  from 
morality.  Or  should  1  attempt  to  distinguish  them  by  their  ob 
jects,  so  that  morality  were  the  religion  which  we  owe  to  things 
and  persons  of  this  life,  and  religion  our  morality  toward  God 
and  the  permanent  concerns  of  our  own  souls,  and  those  of  our 
brethren  ; — yet  it  would  be  evident,  that  the  latter  must  involve 
the  former,  while  any  pretence  to  the  former  without  the  latter 
would  be  as  bold  a  mockery  as,  if  having  withholden  an  estate 
from  the  rightful  owner,  we  should  seek  to  appease  our  conscience 
by  the  plea,  that  we  had  not  failed  to  bestow  alms  on  him  in  his 
beggary.  It  was  never  my  purpose,  and  it  does  not  appear  the 
want  of  the  age,  to  bring  together  -the  rules  and  inducements  of 
*  The  second.—  Ed. 


ESSAY    I.  377 

worldly  prudence.  But  to  substitute  these  for  the  laws  of  reason 
and  conscience,  or  even  to  confound  them  under  one  name,  is  a 
prejudice,  say  rather  a  profanation,  which  I  became  more  and 
more  reluctant  to  flatter  by  even  an  appearance  of  assent,  though 
it  were  only  in  a  point  of  form  and  technical  arrangement. 

At  a  time,  when  my  thoughts  were  thus  employed,  I  met  with 
a  volume  of  old  tracts,  published  during  the  interval  from  the 
captivity  of  Charles  I.  to  the  restoration  of  his  son.  Since  my 
earliest  manhood  it  had  been  among  my  fondest  regrets,  that  a 
more  direct  and  frequent  reference  had  not  been  made  by  our  his 
torians  to  the  books,  pamphlets,  and  flying  sheets  of  that  momen 
tous  period,  during  which  all  the  possible  forms  of  truth  and  error 
(the  latter  being  themselves  for  the  greater  part  caricatures  of 
truth)  bubbled  up  on  the  surface  of  the  public  mind,  as  in  the 
ferment  of  a  chaos.  It  would  be  difficult  to  conceive  a  notion  or 
a  fancy,  in  politics,  ethics,  theology,  or  even  in  physics  and  physi 
ology,  not  anticipated  by  the  men  of  that  age  ; — in  this  as  in  most 
other  respects  sharply  contrasted  with  the  products  of  the  French 
revolution,  which  was  scarcely  more  characterized  by  its  sangui 
nary  and  sensual  abominations  than  (to  borrow  the  words  of  an 
eminent  living  poet)  by 

A  dreary  want  at  once  of  books  and  men.* 

The  parliament's  army  was  not  wholly  composed  of  mere  fanat 
ics.  There  was  no  mean  proportion  of  enthusiasts  ;  and  that  en 
thusiasm  must  have  been  of  no  ordinary  grandeur,  which  could 
draw  from  a  common  soldier,  in  an  address  to  his  comrades,  such 
a  dissuasive  from  acting  in  the  cruel  spirit  of  fear,  and  such  senti 
ments,  as  are  contained  in  the  following  passage,  which  I  would 
rescue  from  oblivion,!  both  for  the  honor  of  our  forefathers,  and 
in  proof  of  the  difference  between  the  republicans  of  that  period, 
and  the  democrats,  or  rather  demagogues;  of  the  present.  It  is 
as  follows  : 

"  I  judge  it  ten  times  more  honorable  for  a  single  person,  in 

*  Wordsworth. 

f  The  more  so  because  every  year  consumes  its  quota.  The  late  Sir  Wil 
fred  Luwson's  predecessor,  from  some  pique  or  other,  left  a  large  and  unique 
collection  of  the  pamphlets  published  from  the  commencement  of  the  civil 
war  to  the  Restoration  to  his  butler,  and  it  supplied  the  chandlers'  and  drug 
gists'  shops  of  Penrith  and  Kendal  for  many  years. 


378  THE    FRIEND. 

witnessing-  a  truth  to  oppose  the  world  in  its  power,  wisdom,  and 
authority,  this  standing  in  its  full  strength,  and  he  singly  and 
nakedly,  than  fighting  many  battles  by  force  of  arms,  and  gain 
ing  them  all.  I  have  no  life  but  truth  ;  and  if  truth  be  advanced 
by  my  suffering,  then  my  life  also.  If  truth  live,  I  live  ;  if 
justice  live,  I  live  ;  and  these  can  not  die,  but  by  any  man's 
suffering  for  them  are  enlarged,  enthroned.  Death  can  not  hurt 
me.  I  sport  with  him,  am  above  his  reach.  I  live  an  immortal 
life.  What  we  have  within,  that  only  can  we  see  without.  I 
can  not  see  death  ;  and  he  that  hath  not  this  freedom  is  a  slave. 
He  is  in  .the  arms  of  that,  the  phantom  of  which  he  beholdeth 
and  seemeth  to  himself  to  flee  from.  Thus,  you  see  that  the 
king  hath  a  will  to  redeem  his  present  loss.  You  see  it  by  means 
of  the  lust  after  power  in  your  own  hearts.  For  my  part  I  con 
demn  his  unlawful  seeking  after  it.  I  condemn  his  falsehood  and 
indirectness  therein.  But  if  he  should  not  endeavor  the  restoring 
of  the  kingliness  to  the  realm,  and  the  dignity  of  its  kings,  he 
were  false  to  his  trust,  false  to  the  majesty  of  God  that  he  is  in 
trusted  with.  The  desire  of  recovering  his  loss  is  justifiable. 
Yea,  I  should  condemn  him  as  unbelieving  and  pusillanimous,  if 
he  should  not  hope  for  it.  But  here  is  his  misery  and  yours  too  at 
present,  that  ye  are  unbelieving  and  pusillanimous,  and  are,  both 
alike,  pursuing  things  of  hope  in  the  spirit  of  fear.  Thus  you 
condemn  the  parliament  for  acknowledging  the  king's  power  so 
far  as  to  seek  to  him  by  a  treaty  ;  while  by  taking  such  pains 
against  him  you  manifest  your  own  belief  that  he  hath  a  great 
power  ; — which  is  a  wonder,  that  a  prince  despoiled  of  all  his 
authority,  naked,  a  prisoner,  destitute  of  all  friends  and  helps, 
wholly  at  the  disposal  of  others,  tied  and  bound  too  with  all  obli 
gations  that  a  parliament  can  imagine  to  hold  him,  should  yet  be 
such  a  terror  to  you,  and  fright  you  into  such  a  large  remon 
strance,  and  such  perilous  proceedings  to  save  yourselves  from 
him.  Either  there  is  some  strange  power  in  him,  or  you  are  full 
of  fear  that  are  so  affected  with  a  shadoAV. 

"  But  as  you  give  testimony  to  his  power,  so  you  take  a  course 
to  advance  it ;  for  there  is  nothing  that  hath  any  spark  of  God  in 
it,  but  the  more  it  is  suppressed,  the  more  it  rises.  If  you  did 
indeed  believe,  that  the  original  of  power  were  in  the  people,  you 
would  believe  likewise  that  the  concessions  extorted  from  the  king 
would  rest  with  you.  And,  doubtless,  such  of  them  as  in  right- 


ESSAY    I.  379 

eousness  ought  to  have  been  given  would  do  so,  but  that  your 
violent  courses  disturb  the  natural  order  of  things,  in  which  they 
still  tend  to  their  centre.  These  courses,  therefore,  so  far  from 
being  the  way  to  secure  what  we  have  got,  are  the  way  to  lose 
them,  and  (for  a  time  at  least)  to  set  up  princes  in  a  higher  form 
than  ever.  For  all  things  by  force  compelled  from  their  nature 
will  fly  back  with  the  greater  earnestness  on  the  removal  of  that 
force  ;  and  this,  in  the  present  case,  must  soon  weary  itself  out, 
and  hath  no  less  an  enemy  in  its  own  satiety  than  in  the  disap 
pointment  of  the  people. 

"  Again,  you  speak  of  the  king's  reputation,  and  do  not  con 
sider  that  the  more  you  crush  him,  the  sweeter  the  fragrance 
that  comes  from  him.  While  he  suffers,  the  spirit  of  God  arid 
glory  rests  upon  him.  There  is  a  glory  and  a  freshness  spark 
ling  in  him  by  suffering,  an  excellency  that  was  hidden,  and 
which  you  have  drawn  out.  And  naturally  men  are  ready  to 
pity  sufferers.  When  nothing  will  gain  me,  affliction  will.  I 
confess  his  sufferings  make  me  a  royalist,  who  never  cared  for 
him.  He  that  doth  and  can  suffer  shall  have  my  heart ;  you 
had  it  while  you  suffered.  But  now  your  severe  punishment  of 
him  for  his  abuses  in  government,  and  your  own  usurpations, 
will  not  only  win  the  hearts  of  the  people  to  the  oppressed  suf 
fering  king,  but  provoke  them  to  rage  against  you,  as  having 
robbed  them  of  the  interest  which  they  had  in  his  royalty.  For 
the  king  is  in  the  people,  and  the  people  in  the  king.  The  king's 
being  is  not  solitary,  but  as  he  is  in  union  with  his  people,  who 
are  his  strength  in  which  he  lives  ;  and  the  people's  being  is  not 
naked,  but  an  interest  in  the  greatness  and  wisdom  of  the  king 
who  is  their  honor  which  lives  in  them.  And  though  you  will 
disjoin  yourselves  from  kings,  God  will  not,  neither  will  I.  God 
is  king  of  kings,  kings'  and  princes'  God,  as  well  as  people's, 
theirs  as  well  as  ours,  and  theirs  eminently  (as  the  speech  en 
forces,  God  of  Israel,  that  is,  Israel's  God  above  all  other  nations, 
and  so  king  of  kings),  by  a  near  and  special  kindred  and  commu 
nion.  Kingliness  agrees  with  all  Christians,  who  are  indeed 
Christians.  For  they  are  themselves  of  a  royal  nature,  made 
kings  with  Christ,  and  can  not  but  be  friends  to  it,  being  of  kin 
to  it ;  and  if  there  were  not  kings  to  honor,  they  would  want  one 
of  the  appointed  objects  whereon  to  bestow  that  fulness  of  honor 
which  is  in  their  breasts.  A  virtue  would  lie  unemployed  within 


380  THE    FRIEND. 

them,  and  in  prison,  pining  and  restless  from  the  want  of  its  out 
ward  correlative.  It  is  a  bastard  religion,  that  is  inconsistent 
with  the  majesty  and  the  greatness  of  the  most  splendid  monarch. 
Such  spirits  are  strangers  from  the  kingdom  of  heaven.  Either 
they  know  not  the  glory  in  which  God  lives ;  or  they  are  of  nar 
row  minds  that  are  corrupt  themselves,  and  not  able  to  bear 
greatness,  and  so  think  that  God  will  not,  or  can  not,  qualify 
men  for  such  high  places  with  correspondent  and  proportionable 
power  and  goodness.  Is  it  not  enough  to  have  removed  the  ma 
lignant  bodies  which  eclipsed  the  royal  sun,  and  mixed  their  bad 
influences  with  his,  and  would  you  extinguish  the  sun  itself  to 
secure  yourselves  ?  0  !  this  is  the  spirit  of  bondage  to  fear,  and 
not  of  love  and  a  sound  mind.  To  assume  the  office  and  the 
name  of  champions  for  the  common  interest,  and  of  Christ's  sol 
diers,  and  yet  to  act  for  self-safety  is  so  poor  and  mean  a  thing 
that  it  must  needs  produce  most  vile  and  absurd  actions,  the  scorn 
of  the  old  pagans,  but  for  Christians  who  in  all  things  are  to  love 
their  neighbor  as  themselves,  and  God  above  both,  it  is  of  all  af 
fections  the  unworthiest.  Let  me  be  a  fool  and  boast,  if  so  I  may 
show  you,  while  it  is  yet  time,  a  little  of  that  rest  and  security 
which  I  and  those  of  the  same  spirit  enjoy,  and  wThich  you  have 
turned  your  backs  upon  ;  self,  like  a  banished  thing,  wandering 
in  strange  ways.  First,  then,  I  fear  no  party,  or  interest,  for  I , 
love  all,  I  am  reconciled  to  all,  and  therein  I  find  all  reconciled 
to  me.  I  have  enmity  to  none  but  the  son  of  perdition.  It  is 
enmity  begets  insecurity :  and  while  men  live  in  the  flesh,  and 
in  enmity  to  any  party,  or  interest,  in  a  private,  divided,  and 
self  good,  there  will  be,  there  can  not  but  be,  perpetual  wars  ; 
except  that  one  particular  should  quite  ruin  all  other  parts  and 
live  alone,  which  the  universal  must  not,  will  not,  suffer.  For 
to  admit  a  part  to  devour  and  absorb  the  others,  were  to  destroy 
the  whole,  which  is  God's  presence  therein  ;  and  such  a  mind  in 
any  part  doth  not  only  fight  with  another  part,  but  against  the 
whole.  Every  faction  of  men,  therefore,  striving  to  make  them 
selves  absolute,  and  to  owe  their  safety  to  their  strength,  and  not 
to  their  sympathy,  do  directly  war  against  God  who  is  love,  peace, 
and  a  general  good,-  gives  being  to  all  and  cherishes  all,  and, 
therefore,  can  have  neither  peace  nor  security.  But  we  being 
enlarged  into  the  largeness  of  God,  and  comprehending  all  things 
in  our  bosoms  by  the  divine  spirit,  are  at  rest  with  all,  and  de- 


ESSAY  I.  381 

light  in  all ;  for  we  know  nothing  but  what  is,  in  its  essence,  in 
our  own  hearts.  Kings,  nobles,  are  much  beloved  of  us,  because 
they  are  in  us.  of  us,  one  with  us,  we  as  Christians  being  kings 
and  lords  by  the  anointing  of  God." 

But  such  sentiments,  it  will  be  said,  are  the  flights  of  specula 
tive  minds.  Be  it  so  ;  yet  to  soar  is  nobler  than  to  creep.  We 
attach,  likewise,  some  value  to  a  thing  for  its  mere  infrequency. 
And  speculative  minds,  alas  !  have  been  rare,  though  not  equally 
rare,  in  all  ages  and  countries  of  civilized  men.  With  us  the 
very  word  seems  to  have  abdicated  its  legitimate  sense.  Instead 
of  designating  a  mind  so  constituted  and  disciplined  as  to  find  in 
its  own  wants  and  instincts  an  interest  in  truths  for  their  truth's 
sake,  it  is  now  used  to  signify  a  practical  sthemer,  one  who  ven 
tures  beyond  the  bounds  of  experience  in  the  formation  and  adop 
tion  of  new  ways  and  means  for  the  attainment  of  wealth  or 
power.  To  possess  the  end  in  the  means,  as  it  is  essential  to 
morality  in  the  moral  world,  and  the  contra-distinction  of  good 
ness  from  mere  prudence,  so  is  it,  in  the  intellectual  world,  the 
moral  constituent  of  genius,  and  that  by  which  true  genius  is 
contra-distinguished  from  mere  talent.* 

The  man  of  talent,  who  is,  if  not  exlusively,  yet  chiefly  and 
characteristically  a  man  of  talent,  seeks  and  values  the  means 
wholly  in  relation  to  some  object  not  therein  contained.  His 
means  may  be  peculiar  ;  but  his  ends  are  conventional,  and  com 
mon  to  the  mass  of  mankind.  Alas  !  in  both  cases  alike,  in  .that 
of  genius,  as  well  as  in  that  of  talent,  it  too  often  happens,  that 
this  diversity  in  the  quality  of  their  several  intellects,  extends  to 
the  feelings  and  impulses  properly  and  directly  moral,  to  their 
dispositions,  habits,  and  maxims  of  conduct.  It  characterizes  not 
the  intellect  alone,  but  the  whole  man.  The  one  substitutes  pru 
dence  for  virtue,  legality  in  act  and  demeanor  for  warmth  and 
purity  of  heart,  and  too  frequently  becomes  jealous,  envious,  a 
coveter  of  other  men's  good  gifts,  and  a  detractor  from  their 
merits,  openly  or  secretly,  as  his  fears  or  his  passions  chance  to 
preponderate.! 

*  See  the  note  to  this  essay,  p.  384. — Ed. 

f  According  to  the  principles  of  Spurzkeim's  cranioscopy  (a  scheme,  the 
indicative  or  gnomonic  parts  of  which  have  a  stronger  support  in  facts  than 
the  theory  in  reason  or  common  sense)  we  should  find  in  the  skull  of  such  an 
individual  the  organs  of  circumspection  and  appropriation  disproportion- 


382  THE    FRIEND. 

The  other,  on  the  contrary,  might  remind  us  of  the  zealots  for 
legitimate  succession  after  the  decease  of  our  sixth  Edward,  who 
not  content  with  having  placed  the  rightful  sovereign  on  the 
throne,  would  wreak  their  vengeance  on  "  the  meek  usurper," 
who  had  been  seated  on  it  hy  a  will  against  which  she  had  her 
self  been  the  first  to  remonstrate.  For  with  that  urihealthful 
preponderance  of  impulse  over  motive,  which,  though  no  part  of 
genius,  is  too  often  its  accompaniment,  he  lives  in  continued  hos 
tility  to  prudence,  or  banishes  it  altogether ;  and  thus  deprives 
virtue  of  her  guide  and  guardian,  her  prime  functionary,  yea,  the 
very  organ  of  her  outward  life.  Hence  a  benevolence  that  squan 
ders  its  shafts  and  still  misses  its  aim,  or  resembles  the  charmed 
bullet  that,  levelled  at  "the  wolf,  brings  down  the  shepherd.  Hence 
desultoriness,  extremes,  exhaustion — 

And  thereof  cometh  in  the  end  despondency  and  madness  !* 

Let  it  not  be  forgotten,  however,  that  these  evils  are  the  disease 
of  the  man,  while  the  records  of  biography  furnish  ample  proof, 
that  genius,  in  the  higher  degree,  acts  as  a  preservative  against 
them  ;  more  remarkably,  and  in  more  frequent  instances,  when 
the  imagination  and  preconstructive  power  have  taken  a  scientific 
or  philosophic  direction  ;  as  in  Plato,  indeed  in  almost  all  the  first- 
rate  philosophers, _in  Kepler,  Milton,  Boyle,  Newton,  Leibnitz,  and 
Berkeley.  At  all  events,  a  certain  number  of  speculative  minds 
is  necessary  to  a  cultivated  state  of  society,  as  a  condition  of  its 
progressiveness  ;  and  nature  herself  has  provided  against  any  too 
great  increase  in  this  class  of  her  productions.  As  the  gifted 
masters  of  the  divining  rod  to  the  ordinary  miners,  and  as  the 
miners  of  a  country  to  the  husbandmen,  mechanics,  and  artisans, 
such  is  the  proportion  of  the  trismegisti  to  the  sum  total  of  specu 
lative  minds,  even  of  those,  I  mean,  that  are  truly  such  ;  and  of 

ately  large  and  prominent  compared  with  those  of  ideality  and  benevolence. 
It  is  certain  that  the  organ  of  appropriation,  or  (more  correctly)  the  part 
of  the  skull  asserted  to  be  significant  of  that  tendency  and  correspondent 
to  the  organ,  is  strikingly  large  in  a  cast  of  the  head  of  the  famous  Dr. 
Dodd ;  and  it  was  found  of  equal  dimensions  in  a  literary  man,  whose  skull 
puzzled  the  cranioscopist  more  than  it  did  me.  Nature,  it  should  seem, 
makes  no  distinction  between  manuscripts  and  money -drafts,  though  the  law 
does. 

*  Wordsworth. 


ESSAY    I.  383 

these  again,  to  the  remaining  mass  of  useful  laborers  and  opera 
tives  in  science,  literature,  and  the  learned  professions. 

.This  train  of  thought  brings  to  my  recollection  a  conversation 
Avith  a  friend  of  my  youth,  an  old  man  of  humble  estate  ;  but  in 
whose  society  I  had  great  pleasure.  The  reader  will,  I  hope, 
pardon  me  if  I  embrace  the  opportunity  of  recalling  old  affections, 
afforded  me  by  its  fitness  to  illustrate  the  present  subject.  A  se 
date  man  he  was,  and  had  been  a  miner  from  his  boyhood.  Well 
did  he  represent  the  olden  time,  when  every  trade  Avas  a  mystery 
and  had  its  own  guardian  saint ;  Avhen  the  sense  of  self-impor 
tance  was  gratified  at  home,  and  ambition  had  a  hundred  several 
lotteries,  in  one  or  other  of  which  every  freeman  had  a  ticket,  and 
the  only  blanks  were  drawn  by  sloth,  intemperance,  or  inevitable 
calamity  ;  when  the  detail  of  each  art  and  trade  (like  the  oracles 
of  the  prophets,  interpretable  in  a  double  sense)  was  ennobled  in 
the  eyes  of  its  professors  by  being  spiritually  improved  into  sym 
bols  and  mementos  of  all  doctrines  and  all  duties,  and  every 
craftsman  had,  as  it  were,  two  versions  of  his  Bible,  one  in  the 
common  language  of  the  country,  another  in  the  acts,  objects,  and 
products  of  his  own  particular  craft.  There  are  not  many  things 
in  our  elder  popular  literature,  more  interesting  to -me  than  those 
contests,  or  eclogues,  between  workmen  for  the  superior  worth 
and  dignity  of  their  several  callings,  which  used  to  be  sold  at  our 
village-fairs,  in  stitched  sheets,  neither  untitled  nor  uiidecorated, 
though  without  the  superfluous  cost  of  a  separate  title-page. 

With  this  good  old  miner  I  was  once  walking  through  a  corn 
field  at  harvest-time,  when  that  part  of  the  conversation,  to  which 
I  have  alluded,  took  place.  "  At  times,"  said  I,  "  when  you 
were  delving  in  the  bowels  of  the  arid  mountain  or  foodless  rock, 
it  must  have  occurred  to  your  mind  as  a  pleasant  thought,  that 
in  providing  the  scythe  and  the  sword  you  were  virtually  reaping 
the  harvest  and  protecting  the  harvest-man."  "  Ah  !"  he  replied 
with  a  sigh,  that  gave  a  fuller  meaning  to  his  smile,  "  out  of  all 
earthly  things  there  come  both  good  and  evil ; — the  good  through 
God,  and  the  evil  from  the  evil  heart.  From  the  look  and  weight 
of  the  ore  I  learned  to  make  a  near  guess,  how  much  iron  it  would 
yield  ;  but  neither  its  heft,  nor  its  hues,  nor  its  breakage  would 
prophesy  to  me,  whether  it  was  to  become  a  thievish  pick-lock,  a 
murderer's  dirk,  a  slave's  collar,  or  the  woodman's  axe,  the  feed 
ing  plough-share,  the  defender's  sword,  or  the  mechanic's  tool. 


384  THE    FRIEND. 

So,  perhaps,  my  young  friend,  I  have  cause  to  be  thankful,  that 
the  opening  upon  a  fresh  vein  gives  me  a  delight  so  full  as  to 
allow  no  room  for  other  fancies,  and  leaves  behind  it  a  hope  a^id 
a  love  that  support  me  in  my  labor,  even  for  the  labor's  sake." 

As,  according  to  the  eldest  philosophy,  life  being  in  its  own 
nature  aeriform,  is  under  the  necessity  of  renewing  itself  by  in 
haling  the  connatural,  arid  therefore  assimilable,  air,  so  is  it  with 
the  intelligential  soul  with  respect  to  truth  ;  for  it  is  itself  of  the 
nature  of  truth,  revon^vi]  ex  &ew()iugt  xal  ^eu^ua  delov^  cpvatv 
s%eif  <pdo&8&uoi>ct  tind.Qxei*  But  the  occasion  and  brief  history 
of  the  decline  of  true  speculative  philosophy,  with  the  origin  of 
the  separation  of  ethics  from  religion,  I.  must  defer  to  the  follow 
ing  number. 

NOTE. 

As  I  see  many  good,  and  can  anticipate  no  ill  consequences  in 
the  attempt  to  give  distinct  and  appropriate  meanings  to  words 
hitherto  synonymous,  or  at  least  of  indefinite  and  fluctuating  ap 
plication,  if  only  the  proposed  sense  be  not  passed  upon  the  reader 
as  the  existing  and  authorized  one,  I  shall  make  no  other  apology 
for  the  use  of  the  word,  Talent,  in  this  preceding  essay  arid/  else 
where  in  my  works  than  by  annexing  the  following  explanation. 

I  have  been  in  the  habit  of  considering  the  qualities  of  intellect, 
the  comparative  eminence  in  which  characterizes  individuals  and 
even  countries,  under  four  kinds — Genius,  Talent,  Sense,  and 
Cleverness.  The  first  I  use  in  the  sense  of  most  general  accept-,, 
ance,  as  the  faculty  which  adds  to  the  existing  stock  of  power  and 
knowledge  by  new  views,  new  combinations ;  by  discoveries  not 
accidental  but  anticipated,  or  resulting  from  anticipation.  In 
short,  I  define  Genius,  as  originality  in  intellectual  Construction ; 
the  moral  accompaniment,  and  actuating  principle  of  which  con 
sists,  perhaps,  in  the  carrying  on  of  the  freshness  and  feelings  of 
childhood  into  the  powers  of  manhood. 

By  Talent,  on  the  other  hand,  I  mean  the  comparative  facility 
of  acquiring,  arranging,  and  applying  the  stock  furnished  by  others, 
and  already  existing  in  books  or  other  conservatories  of  intellect. 

By  Sense  I  understand  that  just  balance  of  the  faculties  which 
is  to  the  judgment  what  health  is  to  the  body.  The  mind  seems 
to  act  at  once  and  altogether  by  a  synthetic  rather  than  an  ana- 

*  Plotinus.  Ennead.  III.  1.  8.  s.  3,  slightly  altered. — Ed. 


ESSAY    I.  385 

lytic  process  :  even  as  the  outward  senses,  from  which  the  meta 
phor  is  taken,  perceive  immediately,  each  as  it  were  by  a  peculiar 
tact  or  intuition,  without  any  consciousness  of  the  mechanism  by 
which  the  perception  is  realized.  This  is  often  exemplified  in 
well-bred,  unaffected,  and  innocent  women.  I  know  a  lady,  on 
whose  judgment,  from  constant  experience  of  its  rectitude,  I  could 
rely  almost  as  on  an  oracle.  But  when  she  has  sometimes  pro 
ceeded  to  a  detail  of  the  grounds  and  reasons  for  her  opinion,  then, 
led  by  similar  experience,  I  have  been  tempted  to  interrupt  her 
with—"  I  will  take  your  advice,"  or,  "I  shall  act  on  your  opin 
ion  ;  for  I  am  sure  you  are  in  the  right.  But  as  to  the  fors  and 
becauses,  leave  them  to  me  to  find  out."  The  general  accompani 
ment  of  sense  is  a  disposition  to  avoid  extremes,  whether  in  theory 
or  in  practice,  with  a  desire  to  remain  in  sympathy  with  the 
general  mind  of  the  age  or  country,  and  a  feeling  of  the  necessity 
and  utility  of  compromise.  If  genius  be  the  initiative,  and  talent 
the  administrative,  sense  is  the  conservative,  branch  in  the  intel 
lectual  republic. 

By  Cleverness  (which  I  dare  not  with  Dr.  Johnson  call  a  low 
word,  while  there  is  a  sense  to  be  expressed  which  it  alone  ex 
presses)  I  mean  a  comparative  readiness  in  the  invention  and  use 
of  means,  for  the  realizing  of  objects  and  ideas — often  of  such 
ideas,  which  the  man  of  genius  only  could  have  originated,  and 
which  the  clever  man  perhaps  neither  fully  comprehends  nor 
adequately  appreciates,  even  at  the  moment  that  he  is  prompting 
or  executing  the  machinery  of  their  accomplishment.  In  short, 
cleverness,  is  a  sort  of  genius  for  instrumentality.  It  is  the  brain 
in  the  hand.  In  literature,  cleverness  is  more  frequently  accom 
panied  by  wit,  genius  and  sense  by  humor. 

If  I  take  the  three  great  countries  of  Europe,  in  respect  of  in 
tellectual  character,  namely,  Germany,  England,  and  France,  I 
should  characterize  them  in  the  following  way  ; — premising  only 
that  in  the  first  line  of  the  first  two  tables  I  mean  to  imply  that 
genius,  rare  in  all  countries,  is  equal  in  both  of  these,  the  instances 
equally  numerous  ;  not,  therefore,  contra-distinguishing  either 
from  the  other,  but  both  from  the  third  country.  We  can 
scarcely  avoid  considering  a  Cervantes  and  Calderon  as  in  some 
sort  characteristic  of  the  nation  which  produced  them.  In  the 
last  war  we  felt  it  in  the  hope,  which  the  recollection  of  these 
names  inspired.  But  yet  it  can  not,  equally  with  the  qualities 

VOL.  II.  R 


386  THE    FEIEND. 

placed  as  second  and  third  in  each  table,  be  called  a  national 
characteristic  ;  though,  in  the  appropriation  of  these  likewise,  we 
refer  exclusively  to  the  intellectual  portion  of  each  country. 

GERMANY. 
Genius, 
Talent, 
Fancy  .* 

ENGLAND. 
Genius, 
Sense, 
Humor. 

FRANCE. 

Cleverness, 

Talent, 

Wit. 

So  again  with  regard  to  the  forms  and  effects,  in  which  the 
qualities  manifest  themselves  intellectually. 

GERMANY. 

Idea,  or  law  anticipated,! 
Totality,  $ 
Distinctness. 

ENGLAND. 

Law  discovered,  § 

Selection, 

Clearness. 

*  The  latter  chiefly  as  exhibited  in  wild  combination  and  in  pomp  of  or 
nament.  Imagination  is  implied  in  genius. 

j-  This,  as  co-ordinate  with  genius  in  the  first  table,  applies  likewise  to 
the  few  only  ;  and  conjoined  with  the  two  following  qualities,  as  more  gen 
eral  characteristics  of  German  intellect,  includes  or  supposes,  as  its  conse 
quences  and  accompaniments,  speculation,  system,  method  ;  which  in  a  some 
what  lower  class  of  minds  appear  as  nationality  (or  a  predilection  for  nou- 
mena,  mundus  intelligibiUs,  as  contra-distinguished  from  phenomena,  or 
mundus  sensibilis),  scheme,  arrangement,  orderliness. 

:f  In  totality  I  imply  encyclopaedic  learning,  exhaustion  of  the  subject 
treated  of,  and  the  passion  for  completion  and  the  love  of  the  complete. 

§  It  might  have  been  expressed ; — the  contemplation  of  ideas  objectively, 
as  existing  powers,  while  the  German  of  equal  genius  is  predisposed  to 
contemplate  law  subjectively,  with  anticipation  of  a  correspondent  in  nature. 


ESSAY    I.  387 

FRANCE. 

Theory  invented, 

Particularity,* 

Palpability. 

Lastly,  we  might  exhibit  the  same  qualities  in  their  moral,  re 
ligious,  and  political  manifestations  :  in  the  cosmopolitism  of  Ger 
many,  the  contemptuous  nationality  of  the  Englishman,  and  the 
ostentatious  and  boastful  nationality  of  the  Frenchman.  The 
craving  of  sympathy  marks  the  German  ;  inward  pride  the  Eng 
lishman  ;  vanity  the  Frenchman.  So  again,  enthusiasm,  vision- 
ariness  seems  the  tendency  of  the  German  ;  zeal,  zealotry  of  the 
English  ;  fanaticism  of  the  French.  But  the  thoughtful  reader 
will  find  these  and  many  other  characteristic  points  contained  in, 
and  deducible  from,  the  relations  which  the  mind  of  the  three 
countries  bears  to  time. 

GERMANY. 

Past  and  Future. 

ENGLAND. 

Past  and  Present. 

FRANCE. 

The  Present. 

A  whimsical  friend  of  mine,  of  more  genius  than  discretion, 
characterizes  the  Scotchman  of  literature  (confining  his  remark, 
however,  to  the  period  since  the  union)  as  a  dull  Frenchman  and 
a  superficial  German.  But  when  I  recollect  the  splendid  excep- 

*  Tendency  to  individualize,  embody,  insulate,  as  instanced  in  the  advo 
cacy  of  the  vitreous  and  the  resinous  fluids  instead  of  the  positive  and  nega 
tive  forces  of  the  power  of  electricity.  Thus,  too,  it  was  not  sufficient  that 
oxygen  was  the  principal,  and  with  one  exception,  the  only  then  known 
acidifying  substance  ;  the  power  and  principle  of  acidification  must  be  em 
bodied,  and  as  it  were  impersonated  and  hypostasized  in  this  gas.  Hence 
the  idolism  of  the  French,  here  expressed  in  one  of  its  results,  namely,  pal 
pability.  Ideas  and  a  Frenchman  are  incompatible  terms ;  but  I  confine 
the  remark  to  the  period  from  the  latter  half  of  the  reign  of  Louis  XIV. 
Ideas,  I  say,  are  here  out  of  the  question ;  but  even  the  conceptions  of  a 
Frenchman; — whatever  he  admits  to  be  conceivable  must  be  likewise,. ac 
cording  to  him,  imageable,  and  the  imageable  must  be  fancied  tangible — the 
non-apparcncy  of  either  or  both  being  accounted  for  by  the  disproportion 
of  our  senses,  not  by  the  nature  of  the  objects. 


388  THE    FRIEND. 

tions  of  Hume,  Robertson,  Smollett,  Reid,  Thomson  (if  this  last 
instance  be  not  objected  to  as  favoring  of  geographical  pedantry, 
that  truly  amiable  man  and  genuine  poet  having  been  born  but 
a  few  furlongs  from  the  English  border),  Dugald  Stewart,  Burns, 
Walter  Scott,  Hogg,  and  Campbell — not  to  mention  the  very  nu 
merous  physicians  and  prominent  dissenting  ministers,  born  or 
bred  beyond  the  Tweed  ; — I  hesitate  in  recording  so  wild  an  opin 
ion,  which  derives  its  plausibility,  chiefly  from  the  circumstance 
so  honorable  to  our  northern  sister,  that  Scotchmen  generally  have 
more,  and  a  more  learned,  education  than  the  same  ranks  in  other 
countries,  below  the  first  class  ;  but  in  part  likewise,  from  the 
common  mistake  of  confounding  the  general  character  of  an 
emigrant,  whose  objects  are  in  one  place  and  his  best  affections 
in  another,  with  the  particular  character  of  a  Scotchman  :  to 
which  we  may  add,  perhaps,  the  clannish  spirit  of  provincial 
literature,  fostered  undoubtedly  by  the  peculiar  relations  of  Scot 
land,  and  of  which  therefore  its  metropolis  may  be  a  striking,  but 
is  far  from  being  a  solitary  instance. 


ESSAY  II. 

'H  0(5of  KUTO). 

The  road  downward.  HERACLIT.  Fragment. 

AMOUR  de  moi-meme,  mais  bien  calcule — was  the  motto  and 
maxim  of  a  French  philosopher.  Our  fancy  inspirited  by  the 
more  imaginative  powers  of  hope  and  fear  enables  us  to  present 
to  ourselves  the  future  as  the  present,  and  thence  to  accept  a 
scheme  of  self-love  for  a  system  of  morality.  And  doubtless,  an 
enlightened  self-interest  would  recommend  the  same  course  of 
outward  conduct,  as  the  sense  of  duty  would  do  ;  even  though  the 
motives  in  the  former  case  had  respect  to  this  life  exclusively. 
But  to  show  the  desirableness  of  an  object,  or  the  contrary,  is  one 
thing  ;  to  excite  the  desire,  to  constitute  the  aversion,  is  another : 
the  one  being  to  the  other  as  a  common  guide-post  to  the  "  chariot 
instinct  with  spirit,"  which  at  once  directs  and  conveys  ;  or  em 
ploying  a-  more  familiar  image,  we  may  compare  the  rule  of  self- 


ESSAY    II.  389 

interest  to  a  watch  with  an  excellent  hour-plate,  hand,  and  regu 
lator,  but  without  its  spring  and  wheel-work.  Nay,  where  its 
sufficiency  and  exclusive  validity  are  adopted  as  the  maxim 
(regula  maxima)  of  morality,  it  would  be  a  fuller  and  fairer  com 
parison  to  say,  that  the  maxim  of  self-interest  stands  in  a  familiar 
relation  to  the  law  of  conscience  or  universal  selfless  reason,  as 
the  dial  to  the  sun,  which  indicates  its  path  by  intercepting  its 
radiance.* 

But  let  it  be  granted,  that  in  certain  individuals  from  a  happy 
evenness  of  nature,  formed  into  aTiabit  by  the  strength  of  educa 
tion,  the  influence  of  example,  and  by  favorable  circumstances  in 
general,  the  actions  diverging  from  self-love  as  their  centre  should 
be  precisely  the  same  as  those  produced  from  the  Christian  prin 
ciple,  which  requires  of  us  that  we  should  place  our  self  and  our 
neighbor  at  an  equal  distance,  and  love  both  alike  as  modes  in 
which  we  realize  and  exhibit  the  love  of  God  above  all ; — wherein 
would  the  difference  be  then  ?  I  answer  boldly, — even  in  that, 
for  which  all  actions  have  their  whole  worth  and  their  main 
value, — in  the  agents  themselves.  So  much  indeed  is  this  of  the 
very  substance  of  genuine  morality,  that  wherever  the  latter  has 
given  way  in  the  general  opinion  to  a  scheme  of  ethics  founded 
on  utility,  its  place  is  soon  challenged  by  the  spirit  of  honor. 
Paley,  who  degrades  the  spirit  of  honor  into  a  mere  club-law 
among  the  higher  classes  originating  in  selfish  convenience,  and 
enforced  by  the  penalty  of  excommunication  from  the  society 
which  habit  had  rendered  indispensable  to  the  happiness  of  the 
individuals,  has  misconstrued  it  not  less  than  Shaftesbury,  who 
extols  it  as  the  noblest  influence  of  noble  natures.  The  spirit  of 
honor  is  more  indeed  than  a  mere  conventional  substitute  for  hon 
esty.  For  to  take  the  word  in  a  sense,  which  no  man  of  honor 
would  acknowledge,  may  be  allowed  to  the  writer  of  satires,  but 
not  to  the  moral .  philosopher.  But,  on  the  other  hand,  instead 
of  being  a  finer  form  of  moral  life,  it  may  be  more  truly  de- 

*  Here  are  two  syllogisms,  having  equivalent  practical  conclusions,  yet 
not  only  different,  but  even  contradistinguished.  I.  It  is  my  duty  to  love 
all  men  :  but  I  am  myself  a  man :  ergo,  it  is  my  duty  to  love  myself  equally 
with  others.  II.  It  is  my  nature  to  love  myself :  but  I  can  not  realize  this 
impulse  of  nature,  without  acting  to  others  as  if  I  loved  them  equally  with 
myself:  ergo,  it  is  my  duty  to  love  myself  by  acting  towards  others  as  if  I 
loved  them  equally  with  myself.  Dec.  1820.  — 


390  THE    FRIEND. 

scribed  as  the  shadow  or  ghost  of  virtue  deceased.  Honor  im 
plies  a  reverence  for  the  invisible  arid  supersensual  in  our  nature, 
and  so  far  it  is  virtue  ;  but  it  is  a  virtue  that  neither  understands 
itself  nor  its  true  source,  and  is  therefore  often  unsubstantial,  not 
seldom  fantastic,  and  always  more  or  less  capricious.  Abstract 
the  notion  from  the  lives  of  Lord  Herbert  of  Cherbury,  or  Henry 
IV.  of  France  ;  and  then  compare  it  with  the  1  Cor.  xiii.  and  the 
epistle  to  Philemon,  or  rather  with  the  realization  of  this  fair 
ideal  in  the  character  of  St.  Paul*  himself.  I  know  not  a  better 
test.  Nor  can  I  think  of  any  investigation,  that  would  be  more 
instructive  where  it  would  be  safe,  but  none  likewise  of  greater 
delicacy  from  the  probability  of  misinterpretation,  than  a  history 
of  the  rise  of  honor  in  the  European  monarchies  as  connected 
with  the  corruptions  of  Christianity,  and  an  inquiry  into  the 
specific  causes  of  the  inefficacy  which  has  attended  the  combined 
efforts  of  divines  and  moralists  against  the  practice  and  obligation 
of  duelling. 

Of  a  widely  different  character  from  this  moral  afoecrjg,  yet  as 
a  derivative  from  the  same  root,  we  may  contemplate  the  here 
sies  of  the  Gnostics  in  the  early  ages  of  the  church,  and  of  the 

*  This  has  struck  the  better  class  even  of  infidels.  Collins,  one  of  the 
most  learned  of  our  English  deists,  is  said  to  have  declared,  that  contradic 
tory  as  miracles  appeared  to  his  reason,  lie  would  believe  in  them  notwith 
standing,  if  it  could  be  proved  to  him  that  St.  Paul  had  asserted  any  one  as 
having  been  worked  by  himself  in  the  modern  sense  of  the  word,  miracle  ; 
adding,  "  St.  Paul  was  so  perfect  a  gentleman  and  a  man  of  honor  !"  When 
I  call  duelling,  and  similar  aberrations  of  honor,  a  moi  al  heresy,  I  refer  to 
the  force  of  the  Greek  aipeai^,  as  signifying  a  principle  or  opinion  taken  up 
by  the  will  for  the  will's  sake,  as  a  proof  and  pledge  to  itself  of  its  own 
power  of  self-determination,  independent  of  all  other  .motives.  In  tho 
gloomy  gratification  derived  or  anticipated  from  the  exercise  of  this  awful 
power, — the  condition  of  all  moral  good  while  it  is  latent  and  hidden,  as  it 
were  in  the  centre,  but  the  essential  cause  of  fiendish  guilt,  when  it  makes 
itself  existential  and  peripheric,  si  quando  in  circumferentiam  erumpat ;  (in 
both  cases  I  have  purposely  adopted  the  language  of  the  old  mystic  theoso- 
phers) — I  find  the  only  explanation  of  a  moral  phenomenon  not  very  uncom 
mon  in  the  last  moments  of  condemned  felons  ;  namely,  the  obstinate  denial, 
not  of  the  main  guilt,  which  might  be  accounted  for  by  ordinary  motives, 
but  of  some  particular  act,  which  had  been  proved  beyond  all  possibility  of 
doubt,  and  attested  bj  the  criminal's  own  accomplices  and  fellow-sufferers 
in  their  last  confessions  ;  and  this  too  an  act,  the  n/>n-perpetration  of  which, 
if  believed,  could  neither  mitigate  the  sentence  of  the  law,  nor  even  the 
opinions  of  men  after  the  sentence  had  been  carried  into  execution. 


ESSAY    II.  891 

• 

family  of  love,  with  other  forms  of  Antinomianism,  since  the 
Reformation  to  the  present  day.  But  lest  in  uttering  truth  I 
should  convey  falsehood  and  fall  myself  into  the  error  which  it 
is  my  object  to  expose,  it  will  be  requisite  to  distinguish  an  ap 
prehension  of  the  whole  of  a  truth,  even  where  that  apprehen 
sion  is  dim  and  indistinct,  from  a  partial  perception  of  the  same 
rashly  assumed  as  a  perception  of  the  whole.  The  first  is  ren 
dered  inevitable  in  many  things  for  many,  in  some  points  for  all. 
men  from  the  progressiveness  no  less  than  from  the  imperfection  of 
humanity,  which  itself  dictates  and  enforces  the  precept,  Believe 
that  thou  mayest  understand.*  The  most  knowing  must  at 
times  be  content  with  the  facit  of  a  sum  too  complex  or  subtle 
for  us  to  follow  nature  through  the  antecedent  process.  Hence 
in  subjects  not  under  the  cognizance  of  the  senses  wise  men  have 
always  attached  a  high  value  to  general  and  long-continued  as 
sent,  as  a  presumption  of  truth.  After  all  the  subtle  reasonings 
and  fair  analogies  which  logic  and  induction  could  supply  to  a 
mighty  intellect,  it  is  yet  on  this  ground  that  the  Socrates  of 
Plato  mainly  rests  his  faith  in  the  immortality  of  the  soul,  and 
the  moral  government  of  the  universe.  It  had  been  holden  by 
all  nations  in  all  ages,  but  with  deepest  conviction  by  the  best 
and  wisest  men,  as  a  belief  connatural  with  goodness  and  akin 
to  prophecy.  The  same  argument  is  adopted  by  Cicero,  as  the 
principal  ground  of  his  adherence  to  divination.  Gentem  quidem 
nulfam  video,  neque  tain  kumanam  atque  doctam,  neque  tarn 
immanem  tamque  barbaram,  qucz  non  significari  futura,  et  a 
quibusdam  intelligi  pradiciqzie  j^osse  censeat.^  I  confess,  I  can 

*  The  Greek  verb,  avvievai,  which  we  render  by  the  word,  understand, 
is  literally  the  same  as  our  own  idiomatic  phrase,  to  go  along  with. 

f  De  Divinat.  Lib.  I.  s.  i.  I  find  indeed  no  people  or  nation,  however 
civilized  and  cultivated,  or  however  wild  and  barbarous,  who  have  not 
deemed  that  there  are  antecedent  signs  of  future  events,  and  some  men 
capable  of  understanding  and  predicting  them. 

I  am  tempted  to  add  a  passage  from  my  own  translation  of  Schiller's 
Wallenstein,  the  more  so  that  the  work  has  been  long  ago  used  up,  as 
"  winding  sheets  for  pilchards,"  or  extant  only  by  (as  I  would  fain  flatter 
myself)  the  kind  partiality  of  the  trunk-makers :  though  with  exception  of 
•works  for  which  public  admiration  supersedes  or  includes  individual  com 
mendations,  I  scarce  remember  a  book  that  has  been  more  honored  by  the 
express  attestations  in  its  favor  of  eminent  and  even  of  popular  literati, 
among  whom  I  take  this  opportunity  of  expressing  my  acknowledgments 
to  the  author  of  Wavcrley,  Guy  Manuering,  <tc.  How  (asked  Ulysses,  ad- 


392  THE    FRIEND. 

0 

never  read  the  De  Divinatione  of  this  great  orator,  statesman, 
and  patriot,  without  feeling  myself  inclined  to  consider  this  opin 
ion  as  an  instance  of  the  second  class,  namely,  of  fractional 
truths  integrated  by  fancy,  passion,  accident,  and  that  prepon 
derance  of  the  positive  over  the  negative  in  the  memory,  which 
makes  it  no  less  tenacious  of  coincidences  than  forgetful  of  fail 
ures.  Still  I  should  not  fear  to  be  its  advocate  under  the  fol 
lowing  limitation  ;  non  nisi  de  rebus  divinis  datur  divinatio. 

I  am  indeed  firmly  persuaded,  that  no  doctrine  was  ever 
widely  diffused  among  various  nations  through  successive  ages, 

dressing  his  guardian  goddess)  shall  I  be  able  to  recognize  Proteus  in  the 
swallow  that  skims  round  our  houses,  whom  I  have  been  accustomed  to 
behold  as  a  swan  of  Phccbus,  measuring  his  movements  to  a  celestial  music  ? 
In  both  alike,  she  replied,  thou  canst  recognize  the  god. 

So  supported,  I  dare  avow  that  I  have  thought  my  translation  worthy 
of  a  more  favorable  reception  from  the  public  and  its  literary  guides  and 
purveyors.  But  when  I  recollect  that  a  much  better  and  very  far  more 
valuable  work,  Mr.  Gary's  incomparable  translation  of  Dante,  had  very 
nearly  met  with  the  same  fate,  I  lose  all  right,  and  I  trust,  all  inclination, 
to  complain ; — an  inclination,  which  the  mere  sense  of  its  folly  and  useless- 
ness  will  not  always  suffice  to  preclude.  (1817. — Ed.} 

COUNTESS.  What  dost  thou  not  believe,  that  oft  in  dreams 
A  voice  of  warning  speaks  prophetic  to  us  ? 

WALLEXSTEIN.  There  is  no  doubt  that  there  exist  such  voices ; 
Yet  I  would  not  call  them 
Voices  of  warning,  that  announce  to  us 
Only  the  inevitable.     As  the  sun, 
Ere  it  is  risen,  sometimes  paints  its  image 
In  the  atmosphere,  so  often  do  the  spirits 
Of  great  events  stride  on  before  the  events, 
And  in  to-day  already  walks  to-morrow. 
That  which  we  read  of  the  Fourth  Henry's  death 
Did  ever  vex  and  haunt  me,  like  a  tale 
Of  my  own  future  destiny.     The  king 
Felt  in  his  breast  the  phantom  of  the  knife, 
Long  ere  Ravaillac  arm'd  himself  therewith. 
His  quiet  mind  forsook  him :  the  phantasma 
Started  him  in  his  Louvre,  chas'd  him  forth 
Into  the  open  air.     Like  funeral  knells 
Sounded  that  coronation  festival ; 
And  still  with  boding  sense  he  heard  the  tread 
Of  those  feet,  that  even  then  were  seeking  him 
Throughout  the  streets  of  Paris.      Death  of  Wallenstein,  act  v.  se.  i. 

Poetical  Works,  VII.  p.  667, 


ESSAY    II.  893 

and  under  different  religions  (such,  for  instance,  as  the  tenets  of 
original  sin  and  redemption,  those  fundamental  articles  of  every 
known  religion  professing  to  have  been  revealed),  which  is  not 
founded  either  in  the  nature  of  things,  or  in  the  necessities  of 
human  nature.  Nay,  the  more  strange  and  irreconcilable  such 
a  doctrine  may  appear  to  the  understanding,  the  judgments  of 
which  are  grounded  on  general  rules  abstracted  from  the  world 
of  the  senses,  the  stronger  is  the  presumption  in  its  favor.  For 
whatever  satirists  may  say,  or  sciolists  imagine,  the  human  mind 
has  no  predilection  for  absurdity.  I  would  even  extend  the  prin 
ciple  (proportionately  I  mean)  to  sundry  tenets,  that  from  their 
stangeness  or  dangerous  tendency  appear  only  to  be  generally  rep 
robated,  as  eclipses,  in  the  belief  of  barbarous  tribes,  are  to  be 
frightened  away  by  noises  and  execrations ;  but  which  rather 
resemble  the  luminary  itself  in  this  one  respect,  that  after  a 
longer  or  shorter  interval  of  occultation,  they  are  still  found  to 
re-emerge.  It  is  these,  the  re-appearance  of  which  (nomine  tan- 
turn  mutato)  from  age  to  age  gives  to  ecclesiastical  history  a 
deeper  interest  than  that  of  romance  and  scarcely  less  wild  for 
every  philosophic  mind.  I  am  far  from  asserting  that  such  a 
doctrine  (the  Antinornian,  for  instance,  or  that  of  a  latent  mys 
tical  sense  in  the  words  of  Scripture  and  the  works  of  nature, 
according  to  Origen  and  Emanuel  Swedenborg)  shall  be  always 
the  best  possible,  or  not  a  distorted  and  dangerous,  as  well  as 
partial,  representation  of  the  truth  on  which  it  is  founded.  For 
the  same  body  casts  strangely  different  shadows  in  different  posi 
tions  and  different  degrees  of  light.  But  I  dare,  and  do,  affirm 
that  it  always  does  shadow  out  some  important  truth,  and  from 
it  derives  its  main  influence  over  the  faith  of  its  adherents,  ob 
scure  as  their  perception  of  this  truth  may  be,  and  though  they 
may  themselves  attribute  their  belief  to  the  supernatural  gifts  of 
the  founder,  or  the  miracles  by  which  his  preaching  had  been 
accredited.  See  Wesley's  Journal  for  proofs.  But  we  have  the 
highest  possible  authority,  that  of  Scripture  itself,  to  justify  us 
in  putting  the  question, — whether  miracles  can,  of  themselves, 
work  a  true  conviction  in  the  mind.  There  are  spiritual  truths 
which  must  derive  their  evidence  from  within,  which  whoever 
rejects,  neither  will  he  believe  though  a  man  were  to  rise  from 
the  dead  to  confirm  them.  And  under  the  Mosaic  law  a  miracle 
in  attestation  of  a  false  doctrine  subjected  the  miracle-worker  to 

R* 


394  THE    FRIEND. 

death  ;  and  whether  the  miracle  was  really  or  only  seemingly 
supernatural,  makes  no  difference  in  the  present  argument,  its 
power  of  convincing,  whatever  that  power  may  be,  whether 
great  or  small,  depending  on  the  fulness  of  the  belief  in  its 
miraculous  nature.  Est  quibus  esse  videtur.  Or  rather,  that  I 
may  express  the  same  position  in  a  form  less  likely  to  offend,  is 
not  a  true  efficient  conviction  of  a  moral  truth,  is  not  the  creat 
ing  of  a  neiv  heart,  which  collects  the  energies  of  a  man's  whole 
being  in  the  focus  of  the  conscience,  the  one  essential  miracle, 
the  same  and  of  the  same  evidence  to  the  ignorant  and  the 
learned,  which  no  superior  skill  can  counterfeit,  human  or  de 
moniacal  ?  Is  it  not  emphatically  that  leading  of  the  Father, 
without  which  no  man  can  come  to  Christ  ?  Is  it  not  that  im 
plication  of  doctrine  in  the  miracle  and  of  miracle  in  the  doc 
trine,  which  is  the  bridge  of  communication  between  the  senses 
and  the  soul ; — that  predisposing  warmth  Avhich  renders  the 
understanding  susceptible  of  the  specific  impression  from  the 
historic,  and  from  all  other  outward,  seals  of  testimony  ?  Is  not 
this  the  one  infallible  criterion  of  miracles,  by  which  a  man  can 
know  whether  they  be  of  God  ?  The  abhorrence  in  which  the 
most  savage  or  barbarous  tribes  hold  witchcraft,  in  which  how 
ever  their  belief  is  so  intense*  as  even  to  control  the  springs  of 
life, — is  not  this  abhorrence  of  witchcraft  under  so  full  a  convic 
tion  of  its  reality  a  proof,  how  little  of  divine,  how  little  fitting 
to  our  nature,  a  miracle  is,  when  insulated  from  spiritual  truths, 
and  disconnected  from  religion  as  its  end  ?  What  then  can  we 
think  of  a  theological  theory,  which  adopting  a  scheme  of  pru 
dential  legality,  common  to  it  with  "  the  sty  of  Epicurus,"  as  far 
at  least  as  the  springs  of  moral  action  are  concerned,  makes  its 
whole  religion  consist  in  the  belief  Vf  miracles  !  As  well  might 
the  poor  African  prepare  for  himself  a  fetisch  by  plucking  out 
the  eyes  from  the  eagle  or  the  lynx,  and  enshrining  the  same, 
worship  in  them  the  power  of  vision.  As  the  tenet  of  professed 
Christians  (I  speak  of  the  principle  not  of  the  men,  whose  hearts 
will  always  more  or  less  correct  the  errors  of  their  understand 
ings)  it  is  even  more  absurd,  and  the  pretext  for  such  a  religion 
more  inconsistent  than  the  religion  itself.  For  they  profess  to 

*  I  refer  the  reader  to  Hearu's  Travels  among1  the  Copper  Indians,  and 
to  Bryan  Edward's  account  of  the  Oby  in  the  West  Indies,  grounded  on 
judicial  documents  and  personal  observation. 


ESSAY    II.  390 

derive  from  it  their  whole  faith  in  that  futurity,  which  if  they 
had  not  previously  believed  on  the  evidence  of  their  own  con 
sciences,  of  Moses  and  the  Prophets,  they  are  assured  by  the 
great  Founder  and  Object  of  Christianity,  that  neither  will  they 
believe  it,  in  any  spiritual  and  profitable  sense,  though  a  man 
should  rise  from  the  dead. 

For  myself,  I  can  not  resist  the  conviction,  built  on  particular 
and  general  history,  that  the  extravagances  of  Antinomianism 
and  Solifidianism  are  little  more  than  the  counteractions  to  this 
Christian  paganism  ;  —  the  play,  as  it  were,  of  antagonist  muscles. 
The  feelings  will  set  up  their  standard  against  the  understanding, 
whenever  the  understanding  has  renounced  its  allegiance  to  the 
reason  :  and  what  is  faith,  but  the  personal  realization  of  the 
reason  by  its  union  with  the  will  ?  If  we  would  drive  out  the 
demons  of  fanaticism  from  the  people,  we  must  begin  by  exercis 
ing  the  spirit  of  Epicureanism  in  the  higher  ranks,  and  restore  to 
their  teachers  the  true  Christian  enthusiasm,*  the  vivifying  in 
fluences  of  the  altar,  the  censer,  and  the  sacrifice.  They  must 
neither  be  ashamed  of,  nor  disposed  to  explain  away,  the  articles 
of  prevenient  and  auxiliary  grace,  nor  the  necessity  of  being  born 
again  to  the  life  from  which  our  nature  had  become  apostate.f 
They  must  administer  indeed  the  necessary  medicines  to  the  sick, 
the  motives  of  fear  as  well  as  of  hope  ;  but  they  must  not  with 
hold  from  them  the  idea  of  health,  or  conceal  from  them  that  the 
medicines  for  the  sick  are  not  the  diet  of  the  healthy.  ^Nay,  they 
must  make  it  apart  of  the  curative  process  to  induce  the  patient, 
on  the  first  symptoms  of  recovery,  to  look  forward  with  prayer 
and  aspiration  to  that  state,  in  which  perfect  love  shutteth  out 
fear.  Above  all,  they  must  not  seek  to  make  the  mysteries  of 
faith  wHat  the  wrorld  calls  rational  by  theories  of  original  sin  and 
redemption  borrowed  analogically  from  the  imperfection  of  human 
law-courts  arid  the  coarse  contrivances  of  state  expedience. 

Among  the  numerous  examples  with  which  I  might  enforce 

*  The  original  meaning  of  the  Greek,  favOovotafffidc  is,  —  the  influence  of 
the  divinity  such  as  was  supposed  to  take  possession  of  the  priest  during 
the  performance  of  the  services  at  the  altar. 

ov  1/^7/f  o^erov,  vOev  ?/  rivi  ruijsi 
rL  67]-£vcrac,  em  ru!-iv  dfy'  // 


Zoroastr.   Oracnla  Initio.  Edit.   Opanpfd.  1599.  —  Ed. 


396  THE    FKIEND. 

this  warning1,  I  refer,  not  without  reluctance,  to  the  most  eloquent 
and  one  of  the  most  learned  of  our  divines ;  a  rigorist,  indeed, 
concerning-  the  authority  of  the  Church,  "but  a  Latitudinarian  in 
the  articles  of  its  faith  ;  who  stretched  the  latter  almost  to  the  ad 
vanced  posts  of  Socinianism,  and  strained  the  former  to  a  hazar 
dous  conformity  with  the  assumptions  of  the  Roman  hierarchy. 
With  what  emotions  must  not  a  pious  mind  peruse  such  passages 
as  the  following1 : — "  It  (death)  reigned  upon  them  whose  sins 
therefore  would  not  he  so  imputed  as  Adam's  was  ;  hecause  there 
was  no  lav/  with  an  express  threatening  given  to  them  as  was  to 
Adam  ;  but  although  it  was  not  wholly  imputed  upon  their  own 
account,  yet  it  was  imputed  upon  their's  arid  Adam's.  For  God 
was  so  exasperated  with  mankind,  that  being  angry  he  would 
still  continue  that  punishment  to  lesser  sins  and  sinners,  which  he 
only  had  first  threatened  to  Adam  ;  and  so  Adam  brought  it  upon 
them.  *  *  *  *  The  case  is  this.  Jonathan  and  Michal  were 
Saul's  children.  It  came  to  pass,  that  seven  of  Saul's  issue  were 
to  be  hanged  ;  all  equally  innocent,  equally  culpable.*  David 
took  the  five  sons  of  Michal,  for  she  had  left  him  unhandsomely. 
Jonathan  was  his  friend,  and  therefore  he  spared  his  son  Mephi- 
bosheth.  Here  it  was  indifferent  as  to  the  guilt  of  the  persons" 
(observe,  no  guilt  was  attached  to  either  of  them)  "  whether  David 
should  take  the  sons  of  Michal  or  of  Jonathan  ;  but  it  is  likely 
that,  as  upon  the  kindness  which  David  had  to  Jonathan,  he 
spared  his  son,  so  upon  the  just  provocation  of  Michal,  he  made 
that  evil  to  fall  upon  them,  of  which  they  were  otherwise  capa 
ble  ;  which,  it  may  be,  they  should  not  have  suffered,  if  their 
mother  had  been  kind.  Adam  was  to  God,  as  Michal  to  David. "f 
And  this,  with  many  passages  equally  gross,  occurs  in  a  refuta 
tion  of  the  doctrine  of  original  sin,  on  the  ground  of  its  incongrui 
ty  with  reason,  and  its  incompatibility  with  God's  justice ! 
"  Exasperated"  with  those  Avhom  the  Bishop  has  elsewhere,  in 
the  same  treatise,  declared  -  to  have  been  "  innocent  and  most 
unfortunate" — the  two  things  that  most  conciliate  love  and  pity  ! 
Or,  if  they  did  not  remain  innocent,  yet,  those  whose  abandon 
ment  to  a  mere  nature,  while  they  were  subjected  to  a  law  above 

*  These  two  words  are  added  without  the  least  ground  in  Scripture,  ac 
cording  to  which  (2  Samuel,  xxi.)  no  charge  was  laid  to  them  but  that  they 
were  the  children  of  Saul,  and  sacrificed  to  a  point  of  state  expedience. 

|  Jeremy  Taylor's  Doctrine  and  Practice  of  Repentance,  c.  vi.  s.  1. — Ed. 


ESSAY    III,  397 

nature,  he  affirms  to  be  the  irresistible  cause  that  they,  one  and 
all,  did  sin  ; — and  this  at  once  illustrated  and  justified  by  one  of 
the  worst  actions  of  an  imperfect  mortal !  So  far  could  the  re 
solve  to  coerce  all  doctrines  within  the  limits  of  the  individual's 
power  of  comprehension,  arid  the  prejudices  of  an  Arminian 
against  the  Calvinist  preachers,  carry  a  highly-gifted  and  exem 
plary  divine.  Let  us  be  on  our  guard,  lest  similar  effects  should 
result  from  the  zeal,  however  well-grounded  in  some  respects, 
against  the  Church  Calvinists  of  our  days.  My  own  belief  is, 
perhaps,  equi-distant  from  that  of  both  parties,  the  Grotian  and 
the  Genevan.  But,  confining  my  remark  exclusively  to  the  doc 
trines  and  the  practical  deductions  from  them,  I  could  never  read 
Bishop  Taylor's  Tract  on  the  doctrine  and  practice  of  Repentance, 
without  being  tempted  to  characterize  high  Calvinism  as  (com 
paratively)  a  lamb  in  wolfs  skin,  and  strict  Arminianism  as  ap 
proaching  to  the  reverse. 

Actuated  by  these  motives,  I  have  devoted  the  following  essay 
to  a  brief  history  of  the  rise  and  occasion  of  the  Latitudinarian 
system  in  its  birth-place  in  Greece,  and  to  a  faithful  exhibition 
both  of  its  parentage  and  its  offspring.  The  reader  will  find  it 
strictly  correspondent  to  the  motto  of  both  essays,  ^  080$  xtirw — 
the  way  downwards. 


ESSAY    III. 

ON  THE   ORIGIN  ^AND   PROGRESS   OF  THE   SECT  OF 
SOPHISTS   IN  GREECE. 

'H  ocJof  /curcr 

The  road  downwards.         HERACLIT.  Fragment. 

As  Pythagoras,  declining  the  title  of  the  wise  man,  is  said  to 
have  first  named  himself  philosopher,  or  lover  of  wisdom,  so 
Protagoras,  followed  by  Gorgias,  Prodicus,  and  others,  found  even 
the  former  word  too  narrow  for  his  own  opinion  of  himself,  and 
first  assumed  the  title  of  sophist  ; — this  word  originally  signifying 
one  who  possesses  the  power  of  making  others  wise,  a  wholesale 


898  THE    FRIEND. 

and  retail  dealer  in  wisdom  ;  —  a  wisdom-monger,  in  the  same 
sense  as  we  say,  an  iron-monger.  In  this,  and  not  in  their  abuse 
of  the  arts  of  reasoning,  have  Plato  and  Aristotle  placed  the  es 
sential  of  the  sophistic  character.  Their  sophisms  were  indeed 
its  natural  products  and  accompaniments,  but  must  yet  be  dis 
tinguished  from  it,  as  the  fruits  from  the  tree.  "Eftno^s  *'S  —  • 
xtirtrjloz  —  JU  fiadfaaTtx  neoi&yiav  xuru  TU,  mUe/s,  x«l  rroMor  *•'?*?£ 
x«i  Komi]\evovtGg  —  a  vender,  a  market-man,  in  moral  and  intel 
lectual  knowledges  (connoissances)  —  one  who  hires  himself  out 
or  puts  himself  up  at  auction,  as  a  carpenter  and  upholsterer 
to  the  heads  and  hearts  of  his  customers  —  such  are  the  phrases 
by  which  Plato  at  once  describes  and  satirizes  the  proper  sophist.* 
Nor  does  the  Stagyrite  fall  short  of  his  great  master  and  rival 
in  the  reprobation  of  these  professors  of  wisdom,  or  differ  from 
him  in  the  grounds  of  it.  He,  too,  gives  the  baseness  of  the  mo 
tives  joined  with  the  impudence  and  delusive  nature  of  the  pre 
tence,  as  the  generic  character.! 

Next  to  this  pretence  of.  selling  wisdom  and  eloquence,  they 
were  distinguished  by  their  itinerancy.  Athens  was,  indeed, 
their  great  emporium  and  place  of  resort,  but  by  no  means  their 
domicile.  Such  were  Protagoras,  Gorgias,  Prodicus,  Hippias,  Po- 
lus,  Callicles,  Thrasymachus,  and  a  whole  host  of  sophists  mino- 
rum  gentium  :  and  though  many  of  the  tribe,  like  the  Euthy- 
demus  and  Dionysodorus,  so  dramatically  portrayed  by  Plato, 
were  mere  empty  disputants,  sleight-of-word  jugglers,  this  was  far 
from  being  their  common  character.  Both  Plato  and  Aristotle 
repeatedly  admit  the  brilliancy  of  their  talents  and  the  extent 
of  their  acquirements.  The  following  passage  from  the  TimaBus 
of  the  former  wrill  be  'my  best  commentary  as  well  as  authority. 
"  The  race  of  sophists,  again,  I  acknowledge  for  men  of  no  com 
mon  powers,  and  of  eminent  skill  and  experience  in  many  and 
various  kinds  of  knowledge,  and  these  too  not  seldom  truly  fair 
and  ornamental  of  our  nature  ;  but  I  fear  that  somehow,  as  being- 
itinerants  from  city-  to  city,  loose  from  all  permanent  ties  of  house 
and  home,  and  everywhere  aliens,  they  shoot  wide  of  the  proper 


*  See  the  Protagoras,  B.  12;  and  the 
TTU^IKOV  -yevoc,  of  the  Sophistes,  s.  21.  —  Ed. 

•f-  See  Aristot.  De  Rcprehensione  Sophist.     "Karl  yap  ?/  oatyiariK?/,  (fiaivo- 
H&VT]  Gofyia'  ovaa  8£  /U.T/'  KO.I  6  aotytarTjc,  xpiypuiTiaTfyf  UTTO 
a/U'  OIIA-  ovcr/c.     Ib.  c.  2.  —  Ed. 


ESSAY    III.  809 

aim  of  man,  whether  as  philosopher  or  as  citizen."  The  few  re 
mains  of  Zeno  the  Eleatic,  his  paradoxes  against  the  reality  of 
motion,  are  mere  identical  propositions  spun  out  into  a  sort  of 
whimsical  conundrums,  as  in  the  celebrated  paradox  entitled 
Achilles  and  the  Tortoise,  the  whole  plausibility  of  which  rests 
on  the  trick  of  assuming  a  minimum  of  time  while  no  minimum 
is  allowed  to  space,  joined  with  that  of  exacting  from  intclligi- 
bilia,  vovpevu,  the  conditions  peculiar  to  objects  of  the  senses 
tpatvouFva  or  uia&ai'oui-vn.^  The  passages  still  extant  from  the 
works  of  Gorgias,  on  the  other  hand,  want  nothing  but  the  formf 
of  a  premiss  to  undermine  by  a  legitimate  deduclio  ad  absurdum 
all  the  philosophic  systems  that  had  been  hitherto  advanced,  with 

*  Place  a  tortoise  20  paces  before  Achilles,  and  suppose  the  fleetness  of 
Achilles  to  that  of  the  tortoise  to  be  as  20  to  1.  Whilst  Achilles  moves  20 
paces,  the  tortoise  moves  1  ;  \vhilst  he  moves  the  21st  pace,  she  gains  the 
20th  part  of  the  22d  pace  ;  whilst  he  gains  this  20th  part  of  the  22d  pace, 
she  gains  the  20th  part  of  the  next  20th  part  of  the  same  22d  pace;  and  so 
on  in  infinitum.  See  Aristotle's  solution,  or  attempt  at  it,  in  the  Physics 
VI.  c.  9,  which  consists  chiefly  in  applying  an  infinite  divisibility  of  the  mo 
ments  of  time  to  the  assumed  infinite  divisibility  of  the  parts  of  matter. 
ToiJro  tit!  tan  Tpevdoc'  ov  yap  GvyKEtrat,  6  %p6vo£  e/<  rdv  vvv  ovruv  adiatpsrcov 
uarrep  ov6'  uAAo  [tsyedoc  oixJev. — Ib. 

"  I  had  remarked  to  him"  (Mr.  Coleridge),  says  Mr.  De  Quincey,  "  that 
the  sophism,  as  it  is  usually  called,-  but  the  difficulty,  as  it  should  be  called, 
of  Achilles  and  the  Tortoise,  which  had  puzzled  all  the  sages  of  Greece,  was, 
in  fact,  merely  another  form  of  the  perplexity  which  besets  decimal  frac 
tions  ;  that,  for  example,  if  you  throw  f  into  a  decimal  form,  it  will  never 
terminate,  but  be  '666666,  &c.,  ad  infinitum.  '  Yes,'  Coleridge  replied  ;  '  the 
apparent  absurdity  in  the  Grecian  problem  arises  thus, — because  it  assumes 
the  infinite  divisibility  of  space,  but  drops  out  of  view  the  corresponding 
infinity  of  time.'  There  was  a  flash  of  lightning,  'which  illuminated  a  dark 
ness  that  had  existed  for  twenty-three  centuries." — Tait's  Mag.  Sept.  1834, 
p.  514. 

I  apprehend,  however,  that  this  part  of  the  solution,  such  as  it  is,  is  sub 
stantially  what  Aristotle  means  in  his  remark  on  the  Zenonian  paradox ; 
but  the  latter  part,  namely,  the  detection  of  the  sophism  of  applying  to  an 
idea  conditions  only  properly  applicable  to  sensuous  p/uenomena,  belongs  to 
Mr.  Coleridge  himself. — Ed.  [The  solution  is  given  by  Leibnitz  ;  also  in  a 
Letter  to  Mr.  Foucher.  Opp.  ed.  Erdmann,  I.  p.  115.  S.  C.] 

f  Namely,  if  either  the  world  itself  as  an  animated  whole,  according  to 
the  Italian  school ;  or  if  atoms,  according  to  Deniocritus ;  or  any  one  pri 
mal  element,  as  water  or  fire,  according  to  Thales  or  Empedoclcs ;  or  if  a 
nous,  as  explained  by  Anaxagoras ;  be  assumed  as  the  absolutely  first ; 
then,  (fcc. 


400  THE    FRIEND. 

the  exception  of  the  Heraclitic,  and  of  that  too  as  it  was  genei- 
ally  understood  and  interpreted.  Yet  Zeno's  name  was,  and  ever 
will  be  holden  in  reverence  by  philosophers  ;  for  his  object  was 
as  grand  as  his  motives  were  honorable, — that  of  assigning 
limits  to  the  claims  of  the  senses,  and  subordinating  them  to  the 
pure  reason  ;  while  Gorgias  will  ever  be  cited  as  an  instance 
of  prostituted  genius  from  the  immoral  nature  of  his  object  and 
the  baseness  of  his  motives.  These,  and  not  his  sophisms,  con 
stituted  him  a  sophist,  a  sophist  whose  eloquence  and  logical 
skill  rendered  him  only  the  more  pernicious. 

Soon  after  the  repulse  of  the  Persian  invaders,  and  as  a  heavy 
counterbalance  to  the  glories  of  Marathon  and  Platsea,  we  may 
date  the  commencement  of  that  corruption  first  in  private  and 
next  in  public  life,  which  displayed  itself  more  or  less  in  all  the 
free  states  and  communities  of  Greece,  but  most  of  all  in  Athens. 
The  causes  are  obvious,  and  such  as  in  popular  republics  have 
always  followed,  and  are  themselves  the  effects  of,  that  passion 
for  military  glory  and  political  preponderance,  which  may  well 
be  called  the  bastard  and  the  parricide  of  liberty.  In  reference 
to  the  fervid  but  light  and  sensitive  Athenians,  we  may  enumer 
ate,  as  the  most  operative,  the  giddiness  of  sudden  aggrandize 
ment  ;  the  more  intimate  connection  and  frequent  intercourse 
with  the  Asiatic  states  ;  the  intrigues  with  the  court  of  Persia  ; 
the  intoxication  of  the  citizens  at  large,  sustained  and  increased 
by  the  continued  allusions  to  their  recent  exploits,  in  the  flatte 
ries  of  the  theatre,  and  the  funeral  panegyrics  ;  the  rage  for 
amusement  and  public  shows  ;  and  lastly  the  destruction  of  the 
Athenian  constitution  by  the  ascendency  of  its  democratic  ele 
ment.  During  the  operation  of  these  causes  at  an  early  period 
of  the  process,  and  no  unimportant  part  of  it,  the  sophists  made 
their  first  appearance.  Some  of  these  applied  the  lessons  of  their 
art  in  their  own  persons,  and  traded  for  gain  and  gainful  influ 
ence  in  the  character  of  demagogues  and  public  orators  ;  but  the 
greater  number  offered  themselves  as  instructors,  in  the  arts  of 
persuasion  and  temporary  impression,  to  as  many  as  could  come 
up  to  the  high  prices,  at  which  they  rated  their  services.  NPQV 
irhovaiuv  6/'/pa  aotyiariKij* —  (these  are  Plato's  words) — hireling 
hunters  of  the  young  and  rich, — they  offered  to  the  vanity  of 
youth  and  the  ambition  of  wealth  a  substitute  for  that  authority, 
*  Sophist.es;  s.  17.— Ed. 


ESSAY    III.  401 

which  by  the  institutions  of  Solon  had  been  attached  to  high 
birth  and  property,  or  rather  to  the  moral  discipline,  the  habits, 
attainments,  and  directing  motives,  on  which  the  great  legislator 
had  calculated  (not  indeed  as  necessary  or  constant  accompani 
ments,  but  yet)  as  the  regular  and  ordinary  results  of  compara 
tive  opulence  and  renowned  ancestry. 

The  loss  of  this  stable  and  salutary  influence  was  to  be  supplied 
by  the  arts  of  popularity.  But  in  order  to  the  success  of  this 
scheme,  it  was  necessary  that  the  people  themselves  should  be 
degraded  into  a  populace.  The  cupidity  for  dissipation  and  sen 
sual  pleasure  in  all  ranks  had  kept  pace  with  the  increasing  ine 
quality  in  the  means  of  gratifying  it.  The  restless  spirit  of  re 
publican  ambition,  engendered  by  their  success  in  a  just  war, 
and  by  the  romantic  character  of  that  success,  had  already 
formed  a  close  alliance  with  luxury  ;  with  luxury,  too,  in  its 
early  and  most  vigorous  state,  when  it  acts  as  an  appetite  to  en 
kindle,  and  before  it  has  exhausted  and  dulled  the  vital  energies 
by  the  habit  of  enjoyment.  But  this  corruption  was  now  to  be 
introduced  into  the  citadel  of  the  moral  being,  and  to  be  openly 
defended  by  the  very  arms  and  instruments,  which  had  been 
given  for  the  purpose  of  preventing  or  chastising  its  approach. 
The  understanding  was  to  be  corrupted  by  the  perversion  of  the 
reason,  and  the  feelings  through  the  medium  of  the  understand 
ing.  For  this  purpose  all  fixed  principles,  whether  grounded  on 
reason,  religion,  law,  or  antiquity,  were  to  be  undermined,  and 
then,  as  now,  chiefly  by  the  sophistry  of  submitting  all  positions 
alike,  however  heterogeneous,  to  the  criterion  of  the  mere  under 
standing  ; — the  sophists  meantime  disguising  or  concealing  the 
fact,  that  the  rules  which  alone  they  applied  were  abstracted 
from  the  objects  of  the  senses,  and  applicable  exclusively  to 
things  of  quantity  and  relation.  At  all  events,  the  minds  of  men 
were  to  be  sensualized  ;  and  even  if  the  arguments  themselves 
failed,  yet  the  principles  so  attacked  were  to  be  brought  into 
doubt  by  the  mere  frequency  of  hearing  all  things  doubted,  and 
the  most  sacred  of  all  now  openly  denied,  and  now  insulted  by 
sneer  arid  ridicule.  For  by  the  constitution  of  our  nature,  as  far 
as  it  is  human  nature,  so  awful  is  truth,  that  as  long  as  we  have 
faith  in  its  attainability  and  hopes  of  its  attainment,  there  exists 
no  bribe  strong  enough  to  tempt  us  wholly  and  permanently  from 
our  allegiance. 


402  THE    FRIEND. 

Religion,  in  its  widest  sense,  signifies  the  act  and  habits  of 
reverencing  the  invisible,  as  the  highest  both  in  ourselves  and  in 
nature.  To  this  the  senses  and  their  immediate  objects  are  to 
be  made  subservient,  the  one  as  its  organs,  the  other  as  its  expo 
nents  ;  and  as  such,  therefore,  having  on  their  own  account  no 
true  value,  because  no  inherent  worth.  They  are,  in  short,  a 
language ;  and  taken  independently  of  their  representative  func 
tion,  from  words  they  become  mere  empty  sounds,  and  differ  from, 
noise  only  by  exciting  expectations  which  they  can  not  gratify — 
fit  ingredients  of  the  idolatrous  charm,  the  potent  abracadabra, 
of  a  sophisticated  race,  who  had  sacrificed  the  religion  of  faith  to 
the  superstition  of  the  senses,  a  race  of  animals,  in  whom  the 
presence  of  reason  is  manifested  solely  by  the  absence  of  instinct. 

The  same  principle,  which  in  its  application  to  the  whole  of 
our  being  becomes  religion,  considered  speculatively  is  the  basis 
of  metaphysical  science,  that,  namely,  which  requires  an  evidence 
beyond  that  of  sensible  concretes,  which  latter  the  ancients  gen 
eralized  in  the  word,  physica,  and  therefore,  prefixing  the  prepo 
sition  ^ueicc,  beyond  or  transcending,  named  the  superior  science, 
metaphysics.  The  invisible  was  assumed  as  the  supporter  of  the 
apparent,  t&v  yatvofttvuv — as  their  substance,  a  term  which,  in 
any  other  interpretation,  expresses  only  the  striving  of  the  imagi 
native  power  under  conditions  that  involve  the  necessity  of  its 
frustration.  If  the  invisible  be  denied,  or  (which  is  equivalent) 
considered  invisible  from  the  defect  of  the  senses  and  not  in  its 
own  nature,  the  sciences  even  of  observation  and  experiment  lose 
their  essential  copula.  The  component  parts  can  never  be  re 
duced  into  an  harmonious  whole,  but  must  owe  their  systematic 
arrangement  to  the  accidents  of  an  ever-shifting  perspective. 
Much  more'  then  must  this  apply  to  the  moral  world  disjoined 
from  religion.  Instead  of  morality,  we  can  at  best  have  only  a 
scheme  of  prudence,  and  this  too  a  prudence  fallible  and  short 
sighted  ;  for  were  it  of  such  a  kind  as  to  be  dona  fide  coincident 
with  morals  in  reference  to  the  agent  as  well  as  to  the  outward 
action,  its  first  act  would  be  that  of  abjuring  its  own  usurped  pri 
macy.  By  celestial  observations  alone  can  even  terrestrial  charts 
be  constructed  scientifically. 

The  first  attempt,  therefore,  of  the  sophists  was  to  separate 
ethics  from  the  faith  in  the  invisible,  and  to  stab  morality  through 
the  side  of  religion  ;  an  attempt  to  which  the  idolatrous  polythe- 


ESSAY    III.  403 

ism  of  Greece  furnished  too  many  facilities.  To  the  zeal  with 
which  he  counteracted  this  plan  by  endeavors  to  purify  and  en 
noble  that  popular  belief,  which,  from  obedience  to  the  laws,  he 
did  not  deem  himself  permitted  to  subvert,  Socrates  owed  his 
martyr-cup  of  hemlock.  Still  while  any  one  principle  of  morality 
remained,  religion  in  some  form  or  other  must  remain  inclusively. 
Therefore,  as  they  commenced  by  assailing  the  former  through 
the  latter,  so  did  they  continue  their  warfare  by  reversing  the 
operation.  The  principle  was  confounded  with  the  particular 
acts,  in  which  under  the  guidance  of  the  understanding  or  judg 
ment  it  was  to  manifest  itself. 

Thfls  the  rule  of  expediency,  which  properly  belonged  to  one 
and  the  lower  part  of  morality,  was  made  to  be  the  whole.  And 
so  far  there  was  at.  least  a  consistency  in  this  ;  for  in  two  ways 
only  could  it  subsist.  It  must  either  be  the  mere  servant  of  re 
ligion,  or  its  usurper  and  substitute.  Viewed  as  principles,  they 
were  so  utterly  heterogeneous,  that  by  no  grooving  could  the  two 
be  fitted  into  each  other  ;  by  no  intermediate  could  they  be  pre 
served  in  lasting  adhesion.  The  one  or  the  other  was  sure  to 
decompose  the  cement.  We  can  not  have  a  stronger  historical 
authority  for  the  truth  of  this  statement  than  the  words  of  Poly- 
bius,  in  which  he  attributes  the  ruin  of  the  Greek  states  to  the 
frequency  of  perjury,  which  they  had  learned  from  the  sophists 
to  laugh  at  as  a  trifle  that  broke  no  bones,  nay,  as  in  some  cases, 
an  expedient  and  justifiable  exertion  of  the  powers  given  us  by 
nature  over  our  own  words,  without  which  no  man  could  have  a 
secret  that  might  riot  be  extorted  from  him  by  the  will  of  others. 
In  the  same  spirit  the  sage  arid  observant  historian  attributes  the 
growth  and  strength  of  the  Roman  republic  to  the  general  rever 
ence  of  the  invisible  powers,  and  the  consequent  horror  in  which 
the  breaking  of  an  oath  was  holden.  This  he  states  as  the  causa 
causarum,  as  the  ultimate  and  inclusive  cause,  of  Iloman 
grandeur. 

Under  such  convictions,  therefore,  as  the  sophists  labored  with 
such  fatal  success  to  produce,  it  needed  nothing  but  the  excite 
ment  of  the  passions  under  circumstances  of  public  discord  to  turn 
the  arguments  of  expedience  and  self-love  against  the  whole 
scheme  of  morality  founded  on  them,  and  to  procure  a  favorable 
hearing  for  the  doctrines,  which  Plato  attributes  to  the  sophist 


404  THE    FRIEND. 

Callicles.*  The  passage  is  curious,  and  might  be  entitled,  a 
Jacobin  head,  a  genuine  antique,  in  high  preservation.  "  By 
nature,"  exclaims  this  Napoleon  of  old,  "  the  worse  off' is  always 
the  more  infamous,  that,  namely,  which  suffers  wrong  ;  but  ac 
cording  to  the  law  it  is  the  doing  of  wrong.  For  no  man  of 
noble  spirit  will  let  himself  be  wronged  ;  this  a  slave  only  en 
dures,  who  is  not  worth  the  life  he  has,  and  under  injuries  and 
insults  can  neither  help  himself  nor  those  that  belong  to  him. 
Those,  who  first  made  the  laws,  were,  in  my  opinion,  feeble 
creatures,  which  in  fact  the  greater  number  of  men  are  ;  or  they 
would  not  remain  entangled  in  these  spider-webs.  Such,  how 
ever,  being  the  case,  laws,  honor,  and  ignominy  were  all  calcu 
lated  for  the  advantage  of  the  law-makers.  But  in  order  to 
frighten  away  the  stronger,  whom  they  could  not  coerce  by  fair 
contest,  and  to  secure  greater  advantages  for  themselves  than 
their  feebleness  could  otherwise  have  procured,  they  preached  up 
the  doctrine,  that  it  was  base  and  contrary  to  right  to  wish  to 
have  any  thing  beyond  others  ;  and  that  in  this  wish  consisted 
the  essence  of  injustice.  Doubtless  it  was  very  agreeable  to  them, 
if  being  creatures  of  a  meaner  class  they  were  allowed  to  share 
equally  with  their  natural  superiors.  But  nature  dictates  plainly 
enough  another  code  of  right,  namely,  that  the  nobler  and 
stronger  should  possess  more  than  the  weaker  and  more  pusillani 
mous.  Where  the  power  is,  there  lies  the  substantial  right.  The 
whole  realm  of  animals,  nay  the  human  race  itself  as  collected  in 
independent  states  and  nations,  demonstrates  that  the  stronger 
has  a  right  to  control  the  weaker  for  his  own  advantage.  As 
suredly,  they  have  the  genuine  notion  of  right,  and  follow  the 
law  of  nature,  though  truly  not  that  which  is  holden  valid  in  our 
governments.  But  the  minds  of  our  youths  are  preached  away 
from  them  by  declamations  on  the  beauty  and  fitness  of  letting 
themselves  be  mastered,  till  by  these  verbal  conjurations  the 
noblest  nature  is  tamed  and  cowed,  like  a  young  lion  born  and 
bred  in  a  cage.  Should  a  man  with  full  untamed  force  but  once 
step  forward,  he  would  break  all  jour  spells  and  conjurations, 
trample  your  contra-natural  laws  under  his  feet,  vault  into  the 
seat  of  supreme  power,  and  in  a  splendid  style  make  the  right  of 
nature  be  valid  among  you." 

*  See  the  speech  of  Callicles  in  the  Gorgias : — <j>vaei  ju£v  yap  T 

i<JTLV  5  TTEp  KOt  KUKiOV,  7T.  T.  A. Ed. 


ESSAY    III.  405 

It  would  have  been  well  for  mankind,  if  such  had  always  been 
the  language  of  sophistry.  A  selfishness,  that  excludes  partner 
ship,  all  men  have  an.  interest  in  repelling.  Yet  the  principle  is 
the  same  :  and  if  ibr  power  we  substitute  pleasure  and  the  means 
of  pleasure,  it  is  easy  to  construct  a  system  well  fitted  to  corrupt 
natures,  and  the  more  mischievous  in  proportion  as  it  is  less 
alarming.  As  long  as  the  spirit  of  philosophy  reigns  in  the 
learned  and  highest  class,  and  that  of  religion  in  all  classes,  a 
tendency  to  blend  and  unite  will  be  found  in  all  objects  of  pur 
suit,  and  the  whole  discipline  of  mind  and  manners  will  be  cal 
culated  in  relation  to  the  worth  of  the  agents.  With  the  prev 
alence  of  sophistry,  when  the  pure  will  (if  indeed  the  existence 
of  a  will  be  admitted  in  any  other  sense  than  as  the  temporary 
main  current  in  the  wide  gust-eddying  stream  of  our  desires  and 
aversions) — with  this  prevalence  of  sophistry,  when  the  pure  will 
is  ranked  among  the  means  to  an  alien  end,  instead  of  being 
itself  the  one  absolute  end,  in  the  participation  of  which  all  other 
things  are  worthy  to  be  called  good,  commences  the  epoch  of 
division  and  separation.  Things  are  rapidly  improved,  persons 
as  rapidly  deteriorated  ;  and  for  an  indefinite  period  the  powers 
of  the  aggregate  increase,  as  the  strength  of  the  individual  de 
clines.  Still,  however,  sciences  may  be  estranged  from  philoso 
phy,  the  practical  from  the  speculative,  and  one  of  the  two  at 
least  may  remain.  Music  may  be  divided  from  poetry,  and  both 
may  continue  to  exist,  though  with  diminished  influence.  But 
religion  and  morals  cannot  be  disjoined  without  the  destruction 
of  both  :  and  that  this  does  not  take  place  to  the  full  extent,  we 
owe  to  the  frequency  with  which  both  take  shelter  in  the  heart, 
and  that  men  are  always  better  or  worse  than  the  maxims  which 
they  adopt  or  concede. 

To  demonstrate  the  hollowness  of  the  present  system,  and  to 
deduce  the  truth  from  its  sources,  is  not  possible  for  me  without 
a  previous  agreement  as  to  the  principles  of  reasoning  in  general. 
The  attempt  could  neither  be  made  within  the  limits  of  the  pres 
ent  work,  nor  would  its  success  greatly  affect  the  immediate 
moral  interests  of  the  majority  of  the  readers  for  whom  this  work 
was  especially  written.  For  as  sciences  are  systems  on  princi 
ples,  so  in  the  life  of  practice  is  morality  a  principle  without  a 
system.  Systems  of  morality  are  in  truth  nothing  more  than  the 
old  books  of  casuistry  generalized,  even  of  that  casuistry,  which 


406  THE    FRIEND. 

the  genius  of  Protestantism  gradually  worked  off  from  itself  like 
a  heterogeneous  humor,  together  with  the  practice  of  auricular 
confession  ;  —  a  fact  the  more  striking,  because  in  both  instances 
it  was  against  the  intention  of  the  first  teachers  of  the  Reforma 
tion  ;  and  the  revival  of  both  was  not  only  urged,  but  provided 
for,  though  in  vain,  by  no  less  men  than  Bishops  Saunderson  and 
Jeremy  Taylor. 

But  there  is  yet  another  prohibitory  reason  ;  and  this  I  can  not 
convey  more  effectually  than  in  the  words  of  Plato  to  Dionysius  : 


TTOIOV  n  /ur/v  TOVT"  i?iv,  w  ndi  kiovvoiov  Kdl  Aopidoc,  TO 
b  TcdvTuv  aiTiov  i?i  rcaKuv  ;  [iahhov  dt:  i]  rrepl  TOVTOV  tides  iv  Ty  ipv^y  eyyiy- 
el  JUT/  ng  £%aipe6/]a£Tat,  r//f  dhtfdetac  OVTU$  ov  fzrjrro 


But  what  a  question  is  this,  which  you  propose,  O,  son  of  Dionysius  and 
Doris  !  —  what  is  the  origin  and  cause  of  all  evil  ?  But  rather  is  the  'dark 
ness  and  travail  concerning  this  that  thorn  in  the  soul,  which  unless  a 
man  shall  have  had  removed,  never  can  he  partake  of  the  truth  that  is 
verily  and  indeed  truth. 

Yet  that  I  may  fulfil  the  original  scope  of  The  Friend,  I  shall 
attempt  to  provide  the  preparatory  steps  for  such  an  investigation 
in  the  following  essays  on  the  principles  of  method  common  to  all 
investigations  ;  which  I  here  present,  as  the  basis  of  my  future 
philosophical  and  theological  writings,  and  as  the  necessary  in 
troduction  to  the  same.  And  in  addition  to  this,  I  can  conceive 
no  object  of  inquiry  more  appropriate,  none  which,  commencing 
with  the  most  familiar  truths,  with  facts  of  hourly  experience, 
and  gradually  winning  its  way  to  positions  the  most  compre 
hensive  and  sublime,  will  more  aptly  prepare  the  mind  for  the 
reception  of  specific  knowledge,  than  the  full  exposition  of  a  prin 
ciple  which  is  the  condition  of  all  intellectual  progress,  and  which 
may  be  said  even  to  constitute  the  science  of  education,  alike  in 
the  narrowest  and  in  the  most  extensive  sense  of  the  word.  Yet 
as  it  is  but  fair  to  let  the  public  know  beforehand,  what  the  ge 
nius  of  my  philosophy  is,  and  in  what  spirit  it  will  be  applied  by 
me,  whether  in  politics  or  religion,  I  conclude  with  the  following 
brief  history  of  the  last  hundred  and  thirty  years  by  a  lover  of 
Old  England. 

Wise  and  necessitated  confirmation  and  explanation  of  the  law 
of  England,  erroneously  entitled  The  English  Revolution  of 

*  Epist.  Dionysio.  II.  —  Ed. 


ESSAY    III.  407 

1688  ;  mechanical  philosophy,  hailed  as  a  kindred  movement, 
and  espoused,  as  a  Common  cause,  Iby  the  partisans  of  the  revo 
lution  in  the  state. 

The  consequence  is,  or  was,  a  system  of  natural  rights  instead 
of  social  and  hereditary  privileges ;  acquiescence  in  historic  testi 
mony  substituted  for  faith,  and  yet  the  true  historical  feeling,  the 
feeling  of  being  an  historical  people,  generation  linked  to  genera 
tion  by  ancestral  reputation,  by  tradition,  by  heraldry, — this  no 
ble  feeling,  I  say,  openly  stormed  or  perilously  undermined. 

Imagination  excluded  from  poesy,  and  fancy  paramount  in 
physics  ;  the  eclipse  of  the  ideal  by  the  mere  shadow  of  the  sen 
sible  ;  subfiction  for  supposition.  Plebs  pro  senatu  popidoque  ; 
the  wealth  of  nations  for  the  well-being  of  nations,  and  of  man. 

Anglo-mania  in  France  followed  by  revolution  in  America  ; 
constitution  of  America  appropriate,  perhaps,  to  America,  but 
elevated  from  a  particular  experiment  to  a  universal  model. 
The  word  constitution  altered  to  mean  a  capitulation,  a  treaty, 
imposed  by  the  people  on  their  own  government,  as  on  a  con 
quered  enemy  ;  hence  giving  sanction  to  falsehood  and  univer 
sality  to  anomaly. 

Despotism,  despotism,  despotism,  of  finance  in  statistics,  of  van 
ity  in  social  converse,  of  presumption  and  overweening  contempt 
of  the  ancients  in  individuals. 

French  Revolution  ;  pauperism,  revenue  laws,  government  by 
clubs,  committees,  societies,  reviews,  and  newspapers. 

Thus  it  is  that  a  nation  first  sets  fire  to  a  neighboring  nation ; 
then  catches  fire  and  burns  backward. 

Statesmen  should  know  that  a  learned  class  is  an  essential  ele 
ment  of  a  state,  at  least  of  a  Christian  state.  But  you  wish  for 
general  illumination  !  You  begin  with  the  attempt  to  popular 
ize  learning  and  philosophy ;  but  you  will  end  in  the  plebifica- 
tion  of  knowledge.  A  true  philosophy  in  the  learned  class  is 
essential  to  a  true  religious  feeling  in  all  classes. 

In  fine,  religion,  true  or  false,  is  and  ever  has  been  the  moral 
centre  of  gravity  in  Christendom,  to  which  all  other  things  must 
and  will  accommodate  themselves. 


ESSAY    IV. 


6£  fj.era  ravra  SIKOIOV  i~i  Troielv,  a/cove,  Iva  COL  Kal  dTroKpivcjftai  o  ad 
j-  xprj  KXKIV  k^  Kal  o£  Tcpbe  a^^Aouf.     Et  [t£v  o/lwf  0tAoffo0mf 
KaTaTCE<pp6v7jKa£,  eav  %aipetv'  et,  6e  Trap'  erepov  a/c///coaf  f)   avrbq  /3e'A,Tiova 

TUV  Trap'  t/uoi,  eitelva  ripa'  el  6'  apa  rd  Trap'  f][j.tiv  001  apea/cei, 
Kal  EJ.&  j.uAts'a.  PLATO.* 


Hear  then  what  ai'e  the  terms  on  which  you  and  I  ought  to  stand  toward 
each  other.  If  you  hold  philosophy  altogether  in  contempt,  bid  it  farewell 
Or  if  you  have  heard  from  any  other  person,  or  have  yourself  found  out  a 
better  than  mine,  then  give  honor  to  that,  whichever  it  be.  But  if  the 
doctrine  taught  in  these  our  works  please  you,  then  it  is  but  just  that  you 
should  honor  me  too  in  the  same  proportion. 

WHAT  is  that  which  first  strikes  us,  and  strikes  us  at  once,  in 
a  man  of  education,  and  which,  among  educated  men,  so  in 
stantly  distinguishes  the  man  of  superior  mind,  that  (as  was  ob 
served  with  eminent  propriety  of  the  late  Edmund  Burke)  "we 
can  not  stand  under  the  same  archway  during  a  shower  of  rain, 
without  finding  him  out  ?"  Not  the  weight  or  novelty  of  his  re 
marks  ;  not  any  unusual  interest  of  facts  communicated  by  him  ; 
for  we  may  suppose  both  the  one  and  the  other  precluded  by  the 
shortness  of  our  intercourse,  and  the  triviality  of  the  subjects. 
The  difference  will  be  impressed  and  felt,  though  the  conversa 
tion  should  be  confined  to  the  state  of  the  weather  or  the  pave 
ment.  Still  less  will  it  arise  from  any  peculiarity  in  his  words 
and  phrases.  For  if  he  be,  as  we  now  assume,  a  well-educated 
man  as  well  as  a  man  of  superior  powers,  he  will  not  fail  to  fol 
low  the  golden  rule  of  Julius  Caesar,  insolens  verbum,  tanquam 
scopulum,  evitare.  Unless  where  new  things  necessitate  new 
terms,  he  will  avoid  an  unusual  word  as  a  rock.  It  must  have 
been  among  the  earliest  lessons  of  his  youth,  that  the  breach  of 
this  precept,  at  all  times  hazardous,  becomes  ridiculous  in  the 
topics  of  ordinary  conversation.  There  remains  but  one  other 

*  Epist.  Dlonysio.  II.  —  Ed. 


ESSAY    IV.  409 

point  of  distinction  possible  ;  and  this  must  be,  and  in  i'act  is,  the 
true  cause  of  the  impression  made  on  us.  It  is  the  unpremedi 
tated  and  evidently  habitual  arrangement  of  his  words,  grounded 
on  the  habit  of  foreseeing,  in  each  integral  part,  or  (more  plainly) 
in  every  sentence,  the  whole  that  he  then  intends  to  communi 
cate.  However  irregular  and  desultory  his  talk,  there  is  method 
in  the  fragments. 

Listen,  on  the  other  hand,  to  an  ignorant  man,  though  perhaps 
shrewd  arid  able  in  his  particular  calling,  whether  he  be  describ 
ing  or  relating.  We  immediately  perceive,  that  his  memory  alone 
is  called  into  action  ;  and  that  the  objects  and  events  recur  in  the 
narration  in  the  same  order,  and 


however  accidental  or  impertinent,  in  which  they  had  first  oc 
curred  jo^the  narrator.  The  necessity  of  taking  breath,  the  efforts 
of  recollection,  and  the  abrupt  rectification  of  its  failures,  produce 
alHiis  pauses  ;  and  with  ^xc^piiflruo£4lie  "  aridjhcn,"  the  "_and 
there,"  and  the  still  less  significant,  "  and  so,"  they  constitute 
likewise  all  his  "connections. 

Our  discussion,  however,  is  confined  to  method  as  employed  in 
the  formation  of  the  understanding,  and  in  the  constructions  of 
science  and  literature.  It  would  indeed  be  superfluous  to  at 
tempt  a  proof  of  its  importance  in  the  business  and  economy  of 
active  or  domestic  life.  From  the  cotter's  hearth  or  the  work 
shop  of  the  artisan  to  the  palace  or  the  arsenal,  the  first  merit, 
that  which  admits  neither  substitute  nor  equivalent,  is,  that 
everything  be  in  its  place.  Where  this  charm  is  wanting,  every 
other  merit  either  loses  its  name,  or  becomes  an  additional 
ground  of  accusation  and  regret.  Of  one,  by  whom  it  is  emi 
nently  possessed,  we  say  proverbially,  he  is  like  clock-work.  The 
resemblance  extends  beyond  the  point  of  regularity,  and  yet  falls 
short  of  the  truth.  Both  do,  indeed,  at  once  divide  and  announce 
the  silent  and  otherwise  indistinguishable  lapse  of  time.  But  the 
man  of  methodical  industry  and  honorable  pursuits  does  more  ; 
he  realizes  its  ideal  divisions,  and  gives  a  character  and  individ 
uality  to  its  moments.  If  the  idle  are  described  as  killing  time, 
he  may  be  justly  said  to  call  it  into  life  and  moral  being,  while 
he  makes  it  the  distinct  object  not  only  of  the  consciousness,  but 
of  the  conscience.  He  organizes  the  hours,  and  gives  them  a 
soul  ;  and  that,  the  very  essence  of  which  is  to  fleet  away,  and 
evermore  to  have  been,  he  takes  up  iiito^  his  own  permanence 

VOL.  n.  —  S 


410  THE    FKIEND. 

and  communicates  to  it  the  impcrishablenesB  of  a  spiritual  na 
ture.  Of  the  good  and  faithful  servant,  whose  energies,  thus 
directed,  are  thus  methodized,  it  is  less  truly  affirmed,  that  he 
lives  in  time,  than  that  time  lives  in  him.  His  days,  months, 
and  years,  as  the  stops  and  punctual  marks  in  the  records  of  du 
ties  performed,  will  survive  the  wreck  of  worlds,  and  remain  ex 
tant  when  time  itself  shall  be  no  more. 

But  as  the  importance  of  method  in  the  duties  of  social  life  is 
incomparably  greater,  so  are  its  practical  elements  proportionally 
obvious,  and  such  as  relate  to  the  will  far  more  than  to  the  un 
derstanding.  Henceforward,  therefore,  we  contemplate  its  bear 
ings  on  the  latter. 

The  difference  between  the  products  of  a  well-disciplined  and 
those  of  an  uncultivated  understanding,  in  relation  to  what  we 
will  now  venture  to  call  the  science  ot  method,  is  olten  and  ad 
mirably  exhibited  by  our  great  jlrjurjatist  I  scarcely  need  refer 
my  readers  tothe  Clown's  evidence,  in  the  first  scene  of  the  sec 
ond  act  of  Measure  for  Measure,  or  to  the  Nurse  in  Romeo  and 
Juliet.  But  not  to  leave  the  position,  without  an  instance  to 
illustrate  it,  I  will  take  the  easy-yielding  Mrs.  duickly's  relation 
of  the  circumstances  of  Sir  John  Falstaff's  debt  to  her : — 

FALSTAFF.  "What  is  the  gross  sum  that  I  owe  thee  ? 

HOST.  Marry,  if  thou  wert  an  honest  man,  thyself  and  the  money  too. 
Thou  didst  swear  to  me  upon  a  parcel-gilt  goblet,  sitting  in  my  Dolphin 
chamber,  at  the  round  table,  by  a  sea-coal  fire,  upon  Wednesday  in  Whitsun 
week,  when  the  prince  broke  thy  head  for  liking  his  father  to  a  singing- 
man  of  Windsor  ;  thou  didst  swear  to  me  then,  as  I  was  washing  thy  wound, 
to  marry  me  and  make  me  my  lady  thy  wife.  Canst  thou  deny  it  ?  Did 
not  goodwife  Keech,  the  butcher's  wife,  come  in  then  and  call  me  gossip 
Quickly  ? — coming  in  to  borrow  a  mess  of  vinegar  ;  telling  us  she  had  a  good 
dish  of  prawns ;  whereby  thou  didst  desire  to  eat  some ;  whereby  I  told 
thee  they  were  ill  for  a  green  wound,  <fcc.* 

And  this,  be  it  observed,  is  so  far  from  being  carried  beyond 
the  bounds  of  a  fair  imitation,  that_the  poor  soul's  thoughts  and 
sentences  are  more  closely  interlinked  than  the  truth  of .  nature 
would  have  required,  but  that  the  connections  and  sequence, 
which  the  habit  of  method  can  alone  give,  have  in  this  instance 
a  substitute  in  the  fusion  of  passion.  For  the  absence  of  method, 
which  characterizes  the  uneducated,  is  occasioned  by  an  habitual 
ivTPtTlL  act  ii.  sc.  I.— Ed 


ESSAY    IV.  411 

submission  of  the  understanding  to  mere  events  and  images  as 
such,  and  independent  of  any  power  in  the  mind  to  classify  or 
appropriate  them.  The  general  accompaniments  of  time  and 
place  are  the  only  relations  which  persons  of  his  class  appear  to 
regard  in  their  statements.  As  this  constitutes  their  leading 
feature,  the  contrary  excellence,  as  distinguishing  the  well-edu 
cated  man,  must  be  referred  to  the  contrary  habit.  Method, 
therefore,  becomes  natural  to  the  mind  which  has  been  accus- 
tomed  to  contemplate  qiotjthings  only,  or  for  their  own  sake  alone, 
but  likewise  and  chiefly  the  relations  ot'  things,  either  their  rela- 
tions  to  each~other,  or  to  tne  observer,  or  to  me  state  and  appre- 
hension  of  the_hearers. To  enumerate  and  analyze  these  rela 
tions,  with  the  conditions  under  which  alone  they  are  discover 
able,  is  to  teach  the  science  of  method. 

The  enviable  results  of  this  science,  when  knowledge  has  been 
ripened  into  those  habits  which  at  once  secure  and  evince  its  pos 
session,  can  scarcely  be  exhibited  more  forcibly  as  well  as  more 
pleasingly,  than  by  contrasting  with  the  former  extract  from 
Shakspeare  the  narration  given  by  Hamlet  to  Horatio  of  the  oc 
currences  during  his  proposed  transportation  to  England,  and  J-ho 
events  that  interrupted  his  voyage  : — 

HAM.  Sir,  in  my  heart  there  was  a  kind  of  fighting 
That  would  not  let  me  sleep :  methought,  I  lay 
Worse  than  the  mutines  in  the  bilboes.     Rashly, 

And  praised  be  rashness  for  it Let  us  know, 

Our  indiscretion  sometimes  serve  us  well, 

When  our  deep  plots  do  fail :  and  that  should  teach  us, 

There's  a  divinity  that  shapes  our  ends, 

Rough-hew  them  how  we  will 

HOR.  That  is  most  certain. 

HAM.  Up  from  my  cabin, 
My  sea-gown  scarf 'd  about  me,  in  the  dark 
Grop'd  I  to  find  out  them ;  had  my  desire ; 
Finger'd  their  packet ;  and,  in  fine,  withdrew 
To  my  own  room  again :  making  so  bold, 
My  fears  forgetting  manners,  to  unseal 
Their  grand  commission ;  where  I  found,  Horatio, 
A  royal  knavery ;  an  exact  command — 
Larded  with  many  several  sorts  of  reasons, 
Importing  Denmark's  health,  and  England's  too, 
With,  ho !  such  bugs  and  goblins  in  my  life — 
That  on  the  supervise,  no  leisure  bated, 


412  THE    FRIEND. 

No,  not  to  stay  the  grinding  of  the  axe, 
My  head  should  be  struck  offl 

Hou»  Is't  possible  ? 

HAM.  Here's  the  commission; — read  it  at  more  leisure.* 

Here  the  events,  with  the  circumstances  of  time  and  place,  are 
all  stated  with  equal  compression  and  rapidity,  not  one  introduced 
which  could  have  been  omitted  without  injury  to  the  intelligibil- 
ity  of  the  whole  process.  If  any  tendency  is  discoverable,  as  far 
as  the  mere  facts  are  in  question,  it  is  the  tendency  to  omission  : 
and,  accordingly,  the  reader  will  observe  in  the  following  quota 
tion  that  the  attention  of  the  narrator  is  called  back  to  one  ma 
terial  circumstance,  which  he  was  hurrying  by,  by  a  direcj:  ques 
tion  from  the  friend_to_whorn  jthe  storyis^comniunicated,  "  How 
was  this  sealed?"  But  by  a  trait  which  is  indeed  peculiarly 
characteristic  of  Hamlet's  mind,  ever  disposed  to  generalize,  and 
meditative  if  to  excess  (but  which,  with  due  abatement  and  re 
duction,  is  distinctive  of  every  powerful  and  methodizing  intellect), 
all  the  digressions  and  enlargements  consist  of  reflections,  truths, 
and  principles  of  general  and  permanent  interest,  either  directly 
expressed  or  disguised  in  playful  satire. 


I  sat  me  down ; 


Devis'd  a  new  commission  ;  wrote  it  fair. 
I  once  did  hold  it,  as  our  statists  do, 
A  baseness  to  write  fair,  and  labored  much 
How  to  forget  that  learning ;  but,  sir,  now 
It  did  me  yeoman's  service.     Wilt  thou  know 
The  effect  of  what  I  wrote  ? 

Hon.  Ay,  good  my  lord. 

HAM.  An  earnest  conjuration  from  the  king, — 
As  England  was  his  faithful  tributary ; 
As  love  between  them,  like  the  palm,  might  flourish  ; 
As  peace  should  still  her  wheaten  garland  wear, 
And  stand  a  comma  'tween  their  amities, 
And  many  such  like  ases  of  great  charge — 
That  on  the  view  and  knowing  of  their  contents, 
Without  debatement  further,  more  or  less, 
He  should  the  bearers  put  to  sudden  death, 
No  shriving  time  allowed. 

HOR.  How  was  this  seal'd  ? 

HAM.  Why,  even  in  that  was  heaven  ordinant. 
I  had  my  father's  signet  in  my  purse, 


*  Act  v.  sc.  2. 


ESSAY    IV.  413 

"Which  was  the  model  of  that  Danish  seal : 
Folded  the  writ  up  in  the  form  of  the  other ; 
Subscribed  it ;  gave't  the  impression ;  placed  it  safely, 
The  changeling  never  known.     Now,  the  next  day 
Was  our  sea-fight ;  and  what  to  this  was  sequent, 
Thou  know'st  already. 

HOR.  So  Guildenstern  and  Rosencrantz  go  to't  ? 

HAM.  Why,  man,  they  did  make  love  to  this  employment. 
They  are  not  near  my  conscience  :  their  defeat 
Doth  by  their  own  insinuation  grow. 
'Tis  dangerous  when  the  baser  nature  comes 
Between  the  pass  and  fell  incensed  points 
Of  mighty  opposites.* 

It  would,  perhaps,  be  sufficient  to  remark  of  the  preceding  pas 
sage,  in  connection  with  the  humorous  specimen  of  narration, 

Fermenting  o'er  with  frothy  circumstance, 

in  Henry  IV.,  that  if,  overlooking  the  different  value  of  the  mat 
ter  in  each,  -we  considered  the  form  alone,  we  should  find  both 
immethodical, — Hamlet  from  the  excess,  Mrs.  Q,uickly  from  the 
want,  of  reflection  and  generalization ;  ami  that  methocL,~there- 
fore,  must  result  from  the  due  niean  or  balance  between  our  pas- 
sive  impressions  amJ_JjTe^  mind's  own  rp-np.tinn  on  the  same.  \ 
Whether  this  re-action  do  not  suppose  or  imply  a  primary  act  ! 
positively  originating  in  the  mind  itself,  and  prior  to  the  object  in 
order  of  nature,  though  co-instantaneous  with  it  in  its  manifesta 
tion,  will  be  hereafter  discussed.  But  I  had  a  further  purpose  in 
thus  contrasting  these  extracts  from  our  myriad-minded  bard, 
pvQiotovs  &vrtQ.  I  wished  to  bring  forward,  each  for  itself,  these 
two  elements  of  method,  or,  to  adopt  an  arithmetical  term,  its 
two  main  factors. 

Instances  of  the  want  of  generalization  are  of  no  rare  occur 
rence  in  real  life  :  and  the  narrations  of  Shakspeare's  Hostess  and 
the  Tapster  differ  from  those  of  the  ignorant  and  unthinking  in 
general  by  their  superior  humor,  the  poet's  own  gift  and  infusion, 
not  by  their  want  of  method,  which  is  not  greater  than  we  often 
meet  with  in~~that  class^  of  which  they  are  the~3ramatic  repre-  / 
sentatives.  Instances  of  the  opposite  fault,  arising  from  the  ex 
cess  of  generalization  and  reflection  in  minds  of  the  opposite  class, 
will,  like  the  minds  themselves,  occur  less  frequently  in  the  course 
*  Act  v.  sc.  2. 


414  THE    FRIEND. 

of  our  own  personal  experience.  Yet  they  will  not  have  been 
wanting  to  our  readers,  nor  will  they  have  passed  unobserved, 
though  the  great  poet  himself  (6  T^(V  kaviov  yvxty  &aei  tU»;y  tivct 
aauuarov  juogcpulg  noixikotlg  /uogcpdaas*}  has  more  conveniently 
supplied  the  illustrations.  To  complete,  therefore,  the  purpose 
aforementioned,  that  of  presenting  each  of  the  two  components  as 
separately  as  possible,  I  chose  an  instance  in  which,  by  the  sur 
plus  of  its  own  activity,  Hamlet's  mind  disturbs  the  arrangement, 
of  which  that  very  activity  had  been  the  cause  and  impulse. f 

Thus  exuberance  of  mind,  nn  t.hft  OT^  hand,  interferes  with  the 
forms  of  method  ;  but  sterility  of  mind,  on  the  other,  wantirig  the 
spring  and  i™pri1g^j-n  ynmifnl  g^-i'm^  ia  wholly  destrnctivft  of 
method  itself.  "Form  attending  too  exclusively  to  the  relations 
which  the  past  or  passing  events  and  objects  bear  to  general 
truth,  and  the  moods  of  his  own  thought,  the  most  intelligent 
man  is  sometimes  in  danger  of  overlooking  that  other  relation,  in 
which  they  are  likewise  to  be  placed  to  the  apprehension  and 
sympathies  of  his  hearers.  His  discourse  appears  like  soliloquy 
intermixed  with  dialogue.  But  the  uneducated  and  unreflecting 
talker  overlooks  all  mental  relations,  both  logical  and  psychologi 
cal  ;  and  consequently  precludes  all  method  which  is  not  purely 
accidental.  Hence  the  nearer  the  things  and  incidents  in  time 
and  place,  the  more  distant,  disjointed,  and  impertinent  to  each 
other,  and  to  any  common  purpose,  will  they  appear  in  his  nar 
ration  :  and  this  from  the  want  of  a  staple,  or  starting-post,  in 
the  narrator  himself;  from  the  absence  of  the  leading  thought, 
which,  borrowing  a  phrase  from  the  nomenclature  of  legislation, 
I  may  not  inaptly  call  the  initiative.  On  the  contrary,  where 
the  habit  of  method  is  present  and  effective,  things  the  most  re 
mote  and  diverse  in  time,  place,  and  outward  circumstance,  are 
brought  into  mental  contiguity  and  succession,  the  more  striking 
as  the  less  expected.  But  while  I  would  impress  the  necessity  of 
this  habit,  the  illustrations  adduced  give  proof  that  in  undue  pre 
ponderance,  and  when  the  prerogative  of  the  mind  is  stretched 
into  despotism,  the  discourse  may  degenerate  into  the  grotesque 
or  the  fantastical. 

*  He  that  moulded  his  own  soul,  as  some  incorporeal  material,  into  vari 
ous  forms. — THEMISTIUS. 

f  See  the  criticism  on  the  character  of  Hamlet  in  the  Lectures  upon 
Shakspeare  and  other  Dramatists.  IV".  p.  144. — Ed. 


ESSAY    IV.  415 

With  what  a  profound  insight  into  the  constitution  of  the  hu 
man  soul  is  this  exhibited  to  us  in  the  character  of  the  Prince^of 
Denmark,  where  flying  from  the  sense  of  reality,  and  seeking  a 
reprieve  from  the  pressure  of  ITs  duties  in  that  ideal  activity,  the 
overbalance  of  which,  with  the  consequent  indisposition  to  action, 
is  his  disease,  he  compels~tFe  reluctant  good  sense  ol  the  High  yet 
healthful-minded  Horatio  to  follow  him  in  his  wayward  medita 
tion  amid  the  graves  ! 

HAM.  To  what  base  uses  we  may  return,  Horatio !  Why  may  not  im 
agination  trace  the  noble  dust  of  Alexander  till  he  find  it  stopping  a  bung- 
bole  ? 

Hon.  'Twere  to  consider  too  curiously,  to  consider  so. 

HAM.  2fo,  'faith,  not  a  jot ;  but  to  follow  him  thither  with  modesty 
enough,  and  likelihood  to  lead  it :  As  thus ;  Alexander  died,  Alexander  was 
buried,  Alexander  returneth  to  dust ;  the  dust  is  earth ;  of  earth  we  make 
loam :  And  why  of  that  loam  whereto  he  was  converted,  might  they  not 
stop  a  beer-barrel  ? 

Imperious  Caesar,  dead,  and  turn'd  to  clay, 
Might  stop  a  hole  to  keep  the  wind  away  1* 

But  let  it  not  escape  our  recollection,  that  when  the  objects 
thus  connected  are  proportionate  to  the  connecting  energy,  rela 
tively  to  the  real,  or  at  least  to  the  desirable,  sympathies  of  man 
kind  ;  it  is  from  the  same  character  that  we  derive  the  genial 
method  in  the  famous  soliloquy,  "  To  be,  or  not  to  be"f — which, 
admired  as  it  is,  and  has  been,  has  yet  received  only  the  first-fruits 
of  the  admiration  due  to  it. 

We  have  seen  that  from  the  confluence  of  innumerable  im 
pressions  in  each  moment  of  time  the  mere  passive  memoryjnust 
needs  tend  to  confusion.  ;  a  rule,  the  "seeming  exceptions^  to  which^ 
(the  thunder- bursts  in  Lear,  for  instance)  are  really_coriBrmations 
of  its  trutnT^Fbr,  in  many  instances,  the  predominance  of  some 
mighty  passion  takes  the  place  of  the  guiding  thought^jind  theje- 
sult  presents  the  method  of  nature,~rather  than  tfiehabit  of  the 
individualT  For  thought,  imagination  (and  I  may  add,  passion), 
are,  in  their  very  essence,  the  first,  connective,  the  latter  co- 
adunative :  and  it  has  been  shown,  that  if  the  excess  lead  to 
method  misapplied,  and  to  connections  of  the  moment,  the  ab 
sence,  or  marked  deficiency,  eithcr_precludcs  method  altogether, 
both  form  and  substance^  or  (as_the  following  extract  will  exem- 
plify)  retains  the  outwardJorrn-Giily. 

*  Act  v.  sc.  1.  f  Act  iii.  sc.  1. 


416  THE    FRIEND. 

My  liege  and  Madam,  to  expostulate 

What  majesty  should  be,  what  duty  is, 

Why  day  is  day,  night  night,  and  time  is  time, 

Were  nothing  but  to  waste  night,  day  and  time. 

Therefore — since  brevity  is  the  souLof  wit, 

And  tediousness  the  limbs  and  outward  flourishes,-— 

I  will  be  brief.     Your  noble  son  is  mad : 

Mad  call  I  it ;  for  to  define  true  madness, 

What  is't,  but  to  be  nothing  else  but  mad  1 

But  let  that  go. 

QUEEN.  More  matter  with  les^arj. 

POL.  Madam,  I  ¥wear,  I  Tise~noart  at  all. 
That  he  is  mad,  'tis  true :  'tis  true,  'tis  pity : 
And  pity  'tis,  'tis  true :  a  foolish  figure ; 
But  farewell  it,  for  I  will  use  no  art. 
Mad  let  us  grant  him  then :  and  now  remains, 
That  we  find  out  the  cause  of  this  effect, 
Or  rather  say  the  cause  of  this  defect : 
For  this  effect  defective  comes  by  cause. 
Thus  it  remains,  and  the  remainder  thus 
Perpend* 

Does  not  the  irresistible  sense  of  the  ludicrous  in  this  flourish 
of  the  soul-surviving  body  of  old  Polonius's  intellect,  not  less  than 
in  the  endless  confirmations  and  most  undeniable  matters  of  fact 
of  Tapster  Pompey  or  the  hostess  of  the  tavern  prove  to  our  feel 
ings,  even  before  the  word  is  found  which  presents  the  truth  to 
our  understandings,  that  confusion  and  formality  are  but  the  op 
posite  poles  of  the  same  null -point  ? 

It  is  Shakspeare's  peculiar  excellence,  that  throughout  the 
whole  of  his  splendid  piqtjirn-gg.lTf^^ijiftrftgj^  will  pymisft  the 
acknowledge^Tmadeguacy  of  .this  metaphor),  we  find  individual 
ity  every_where,  mere  portrait  nowhere.  In  all  his  various  char 
acters,  we  still  i'eel  ourselves  communing  with  the  same  nature, 
which  is  everywhere  present  as  the  vegetable  sap  in  the 
branches,  sprays,  leaves,  buds,  blossoms,  and  fruits,  their  shapes, 
tastes,  and  odors.  Speaking  of  the  effect,  that  is,  his  works  them 
selves,  we  may  define  the  excellence~of  their  method  as  consist 
ing  in  that  just  proportion,  that  union  and  interpenetration,  of 
•*'  the  universal ajJ(T  the  particular,  which  must  ever  pervade  all 
works  of  decided  genius  and  true  science.  For  method  implies  a 
progressive  tr^jisilJLcav-^uiilJt  js_th  meaning  of  the  word  in  the 
original  language.  The  Greek  /utdodog  is  literally  a  wajTor  path 
- — ...  *  Act  ii.  sc.  2. 


ESSAY    V.  417 

of  transit.  Thus  we  extol  the  Elements  of  Euclid,  or  Socrates' 
discourse  with  the  slave  in  the  Menon  of  Plato,*  as  methodical, 
a  term  which  110  one  who  holds  himself  bound  to  think  or  speak 
correctly,  would  apply  to  the  alphabetical  order  or  arrangement 
of  a  common  dictionary.  But^as  without  continuous  transition 
there  can  be  no  method,  so  without  a  preconception  there  can  be 
no  transition  with  continuity.  The  terrr^rnethod,  can  not  there- 
ibre,  otherwise  than  T>y  abuse,  be  applied  to  a  mere  dead  ar 
rangement,  co^ainmgjnjljse]£jiQ^^ 


ESSAY  Y. 


Scientiis  idem  quod  planlis.  Si  planta  aliqua  uti  in  animo  habeas,  de 
radice  quid  fiat,  nil  refert :  si  vero  transferre  cupias  in  aliud  solum,  tutiits 
est  radicibus  uti  quant  surculis.  Sic  traditio,  quce  nunc  in  usu  est,  exhibet 
plane  tanquam  francos  (pulchros  illos  quidem)  scientiarum  ;  sed  tamen  abs- 
que  radicibus  fabro  lignario  certe  commodos,  at  plantatori  inutiles.  Quod 
si,  disciplines  ut  crescant,  tibi  cordi  sit,  de  truncis  minus  sis  solicitus :  ad  id 
curam  adhibe,  ut  radices  illcesce,  etiam  cum  aliquantulo  terrce  adhcerentis, 
cxtrahantur :  dummodo  hoc  pacto  et  scientiam  propriam  revisers,  vestigiaque 
cognitionis  tuce  remetiri  possis ;  et  earn  sic  transplantare  in  animum  alie- 
num,  sicut  crevit  in  tuo.  BACON. \ 

It  is  with  sciences  as  with  trees.  If  it  be  your  purpose  to  make  some 
particular  use  of  the  tree,  you  need  not  concern  yourself  about  the  roots. 
But  if  you  wish  to  transfer  it  into  another  soil,  it  is  then  safer  to  employ 
the  roots  than  the  scions.  Thus  the  mode  of  teaching  most  common  at 
present  exhibits  clearly  enough  the  trunks,  as  it  were,  of  the  sciences,  and 
those  too  of  handsome  growth  ;  but  nevertheless,  without  the  roots,  valua 
ble  and  convenient  as  they  undoubtedly  are  to  the  carpenter,  they  are  use 
less  to  the  planter.  But  if  you  have  at  heart  the  advancement  of  educa 
tion,  as  that  which  proposes  to  itself  the  general  discipline  of  the  mind  for 
its  end  and  aim,  be  less  anxious  concerning  the  trunks,  and  let  it  be  your 
care,  that  the  roots  should  be  extracted  entire,  even  though  a  small  portion 
of  the  soil  should  adhere  to  them :  so  that  at  all  events  you  may  be  able,  by 
this  mean,  both  to  review  your  own  scientific  acquirements,  re-measuring 

*  Aeye  ydp  UOL  cv'  ov  TO  [itv  TerpuTrovv  TOVTO  jj/ilv  earl  %uptov  ;  /c.  r.  7i. — Ed 
\  De  Augment.  Scient.  vi.  c.  2,  with  some  verbal  alterations  and  trans 
position. — Ed, 


418  THE    FRIEND. 

aa  it  were  the  steps  of  your  knowledge  for  your  own  satisfaction,  and  at  the 
same  time  to  transplant  it  into  the  minds  of  others,  just  as  it  grew  in  your 
own. 

IT  lias  been  observed,  in  a  preceding  page,  that  the  relations 
6"f  objects  are  prime  materials  of  method,  and  that  the  contem 
plation  of  relations  is  the  indispensable  condition  of  thinking  me 
thodically.  It  becomes  necessary  therefore  to  add,  that  there  are 
two  kinds  of  relation,  in  which  objects  of  mind  may  be  contem 
plated.  The  first  is  that  of  law,  which,  in  its  absolute  perfec 
tion,  is  conceivable  only  of  the  Supreme  Being;  whose  creative 
idea  not  only  appoints  to  each  thing  its  position,  but  in  that  po 
sition,  and  in  consequence  of  that  position,  gives  it  its  qualities, 
yea,  gives  it  its  very  existence,  as  that  particular  thing.  Yet  in 
whatever  science  the  relation  of  the  parts  to  each  other  and  to 
the  whole  is  predetermined  by  a  truth  originating  in  the  mind, 
and  not  abstracted  or  generalized  from  observation  of  the  parts, 
there  we  affirm  the  presence  of  a  law,  if  we  are  speaking  of  the 
physical  sciences,  as  of  astronomy  for  instance  ;  or  the  presence 
of  fundamental  ideas,  if  our  discourse  be  upon  those  sciences,  the 
truths  of  which,  as  truths  absolute,  not  merely  have  an  indepen 
dent  origin  in  the  mind,  but  continue  to  exist  in  and  for  the  mind 
alone.*  Such,  for  instance,  is  geometry,  and  such  are  the  ideas 
of  a  perfect  circle,  of  asymptotes,  and  the  like. 

I  have  thus  assigned  the  first  place  in  the  science  of  method  to 
law  ;  and  first  of  the  first,  to  law,  as  the  absolute  kind  which, 
comprehending  in  itself  the  substance  of  every  possible  degree, 
precludes  from  its  conception  all  degree,  not  by  generalization, 
but  by  its  own  plenitude.  As  such,  therefore,  and  as  the  suf 
ficient  cause  of  the  reality  correspondent  thereto,  I  contemplate 
it  as  exclusively  an  attribute  of  the  Supreme  Being,  inseparable 
from  the  idea  of  God  ;  adding,  however,  that  from  the  contem 
plation  of  law  in  this  its  only  perfect  form,  must  be  derived  all 
true  insight  into  all  other  grounds  and  principles  necessary  to 
method,  as  the  science  common  to  all  sciences,  which  in  each,  in 
the  words  of  Plato,  Tu^/d^et  ov  aUo  avi^s  TTJ£  ^marify/J??.  Alienated 
from  this  intuition  or  steadfast  faith,  ingenious  men  may  produce 

*  Here  I  have  fallen  into  an  error.  The  terms,  idea  and  law,  are  always 
correlative.  Instead  of  geometrical  ideas,  I  ought  to  have  said  theorems ; — • 
not  theories — ;but  6eup?/juara,  the  intelligible  products  of  contemplation,  in 
tellectual  objects  in  the  mind,  and  of  and  for  the  mind  exclusively. — 1829. 


KSSAY    V.  419 

» 

schemes  conducive  to  the  peculiar  purposes  of  particular  sciences, 
but  no  scientific  system. 

But  though  I  can  not  enter  on  the  proof  of  this  assertion,  1 
dare  not  remain  exposed  to  the  suspicion  of  having  obtruded  a 
mere  private  opinion,  as  a  fundamental  truth.  The  authorities 
are  such,  that  my  only  difficulty  is  occasioned  by  their  number. 
The  following  extract  from  Aristotle's  (preserved  with  other  in 
teresting  fragments  of  the  same  writer  by  Eusebius  of  Csesarea). 
is  as  explicit  as  peremptory.  'EfpikoaoyTjas  Jt  n\<jt.-iwv-,  el  xal  jig 
TUV  TKUTrore,  yvrjalwg  v.<tl  rekeiug.  '//£t'ou  ds  ^ur)  dvv&o&ut, 


And  Plato  himself  in  his  Republic,  happily  still  extant,  evidently 
alludes  to  the  same  doctrine.  For  personating  Socrates  in  the 
discussion  of  a  most  important  problem,  namely,  whether  political 
justice  is  or  is  not  the  same  as  private  honesty,  after  many  induc 
tions,  and  much  analytic  reasoning,  he  breaks  off  with  these 
words  —  x«i  ei)  y  i'a&i,  o>  rkavy.wv  ,  &g  i^  ^«t]  d6*a,  ux£u/?(oc  pev  TOUTO 
ix  joioviujv  [ieOodtov^  oi'uig  *\>v  ev  rolg  Aoyo/c  xow/xt.Ou,  oti  ^UTJ  nois 
iu^wei"  aAA,«  y&()  tuakQOie()(x  xai  Tflelwv  odbg  i]  tnl  rovio  ^youaaf 
—  not  however,  he  adds,  precluding  the  former  (the  analytic  and 
inductive,  to  wit)  which  have  their  place  likewise,  in  which  (but 
as  subordinate  to  the  other)  they  are  both  useful  and  requisite. 
If  any  doubt  could  be  entertained  as  to  the  purport  of  these  words, 
it  would  be  removed  by  the  fact  stated  by  Aristotle,  $  that  Plato 
had  discussed  the  problem,  whether  in  order  to  scientific  ends  we 
must  set  out  from  principles  or  ascend  towards  them  :  in  other 
words,  whether  the  synthetic  or  analytic  be  the  right  method. 
But  as  no  such  question  is  directly  discussed  in  the  published 

*  Praparat.  Evangel  xi.  c.  3.  —  Ed,  Plato,  who  philosophized  legiti 
mately  and  perfectivelj,  if  ever  any  man  did  in  any  age,  held  it  for  an 
axiom,  that  it  is  not  possible  for  us  to  have  an  insight  into  things  human 
(that  is,  the  nature  and  relations  of  man,  and  the  objects  presented  by  na 
ture  for  his  investigation,)  without  a  previous  contemplation  or  intellectual 
vision  of  things  divine  ;  that  is,  of  truths  that  are  to  be  affirmed  concern 
ing  the  absolute,  as  far  as  they  can  be  made  known  to  us. 

f  De  Republica,  iv.  But  know  well,  0  Glaucon,  as  my  firm  persuasion, 
that  by  such  methods,  as  we  have  hitherto  used  in  this  inquisition,  we  can 
never  attain  to  a  satisfactory  insight  :  for  it  is  a  longer  and  ampler  way  that 
conducts  to  this. 

Eu     <ip  not  IIAarwv  ijiropei  TOVTO  Kal  £&TEI,  Trorepov  <i~b  TUV  ap^wv,  $ 
xuc,  &GTCV  T)  6J6f.  —  Ethic.  Nicom.  I.  c.  3.  —  Ed. 


420  THE    FKIEND. 

works  of  the  great  master,  Aristotle  must  either  have  received  it 
orally  from  Plato  himself,  or  have  found  it  in  the  ftyguyx*  Jo^ara, 
the  private  text-hooks  or  manuals  constructed  by  his  select  dis 
ciples,  and  intelligible  to  those  only  who  like  themselves  had  been 
intrusted  with  the  esoteric,  or  interior  and  unveiled,  doctrines  of 
Platonism.  Comparing  this  therefore  with  the  writings,  which 
he  held  it  safe  or  not  profane  *o  make  public,  we  may  safely  con- 
elude,  that  Plato  considered  the  investigation  of  truth  a  posteriori 
as  that  which  is  employed  in  explaining  the  results  of  a  more 
scientific  process  to  those,  for  whom  the  knowledge  of  the  results 
was  alone  requisite  and  sufficient  ;  or  in  preparing  the  mind  for 
legitimate  method,  by  exposing  the  insufficiency  or  self-contradic 
tions  of  the  proofs  and  results  obtained  by  the  contrary  process. 
Hence,  therefore,  the  earnestness  with  which  the  genuine  Pla- 
tonists  afterwards  opposed  the  doctrine  (that  all  demonstration 
consists  of  identical  propositions)  advanced  by  Stilpo,  and  main 
tained  by  the  Megaric  school,  who  denied  the  synthesis,  and,  like 
Hume  and  others  in  recent  times,  held  geometry  itself  to  be  merely 
analytical. 

The  grand  problem,  the  solution  of  which  forms,  according  to 
Plato,  the  final  object  and  distinctive  character  of  philosophy,  is 
this  :  for  all  that  exists  conditionally  (that  is,  the  existence  of 
which  is  inconceivable  except  under  the  condition  of  its  depen 
dency  on  some  other  as  its  antecedent)  to  find  a  ground  that  is 
unconditional  and  absolute,  and  thereby  to  reduce  the  aggregate 
of  human  knowledge  to  a  system.  For  the  relation  common  to 
all  being  known,  the  appropriate  orbit  of  each  becomes  discover 
able,  together  with  its  peculiar  relations  to  its  concentrics  in  the 
common  sphere  of  subordination.  Thus  the  centrality  of  the 
sun  having  been  established,  and  the  law  of  the  distances  of  the 
planets  from  the  sun  having  been  determined,  we  possess  the 
means  of  calculating  the  distance  of  each  from  the  other.  But 
as  all  objects  of  sense  are  in  continual  flux,  and  as  the  notices 
of  them  by  the  senses  must,  as  far  as  they  are  true  notices,  change 
with  them,  while  scientific  principles  or  laws  are  no  otherwise 
principles  of  science  than  as  they  are  permanent  and  always  the 
saxraev'fhe  latter  were  appropriated  to  the  pure  reason,  either  as 
its  products  or  as^  implanted  in  it.  And  now  the  remarkable 

*  "Which  of  these  two  doctrines  was  Plato's  own  opinion,  it  is  hard  to 
say.    In  many  passages  of  his  works,  the  latter  (that  is,  the  doctrine  of  in- 


ESSAY    V.  421 

lact  forces  itself  on  our  attention,  namely,  that  the  material  world 
is  found  to  ohey  the  same  laws  as  had  been  deduced  indepen 
dently  from  the  reason  ;  and  that  the  masses  act  by  a  force, 
which  can  not  be  conceived  to  result  from  the  component  parts, 
known  or  imaginable.  In  magnetism,  electricity,  galvanism,  and 
in  chemistry  generally,  the  mind  is  led  instinctively,  as  it  were, 
to  regard  the  working  powers  as  conducted,  transmitted,  or  accu 
mulated  by  the  sensible  bodies,  and  not  as  inherent.  This  fact 
has,  at  all  times,  been  the  stronghold  alike  of  the  materialists  and 
of  the  spiritualists,  equally  solvable  by  the  two  contrary  hypothe 
ses,  and  fairly  solved  by  neither.  In  the  clear  and  masterly*  re- 

nate,  or  rather  of  connate,  ideas)  seems  to  be  it ;  but  from  the  character 
and  avowed  purpose  of  these  works,  as  addressed  to  a  promiscuous  pub 
lic,  therefore  preparatory,  and  for  the  discipline  of  the  mind*,  rather  than 
directly  doctrinal,  it  is  not  improbable  that  Plato  chose  it  as  the  more 
popular  representation,  and  as  belonging  to  the  poetic  drapery  of  his 
pkilosophemata. 

*  I  can  conceive  no  better  remedy  for  the  overweening  self-compla 
cency  of  modern  philosophy  than  the  annulment  of  its  pretended  origi 
nality.  The  attempt  has  been  made  by  Dutens  (Recherches  sur  Vorigine  des 
dccouvertes  attributes  aux  Modernes.  1166. — Ed.},  but  he  failed  in  it^by  fly 
ing  to  the  opposite  extreme.  When  he  should  have  confined  himself  to 
the  philosophies,  he  extended  his  attack  to  the  sciences,  and  even  to  the 
main  discoveries  of  later  times  ;  and  thus  instead  of  vindicating  the  an 
cients,  he  became  the  calumniator  of  the  moderns ;  as  far  at  least  as  de 
traction  is  calumny.  A  splendid  and  most  instructive  course  of  lectures 
might  be  given,  comprising  the  origin  and  progress,  the  fates  and  fortunes 
of  philosophy  from  Pythagoras  to  Locke,  with  the  lives  and  succession  of 
the  philosophers  in  each  sect ;  tracing  the  progress  of  speculative  science 
chiefly  in  relation  to  the  gradual  development  of  the  human  mind,  but 
without  omitting  the  favorable  or  inauspicious  influence  of  circumstances 
and  the  accidents  of  individual  genius.  The  main  divisions  would  be,  1. 
From  Thales  and  Pythagoras  to  the  appearance  of  the  Sophists :  2.  And 
of  Socrates  ; — the  character  and  effects  of  Socrates'  life  and  doctrines 
illustrated  in  the  instances  of  Xenophon,  as  his  most  faithful  repre 
sentative,  and  of  Antisthenes  or  the  Cynic  sect  as  the  one  partial  view 
of  his  philosophy,  and  of  Aristippus  or  the  Cyrenaic  sect  as  the  other  and 
opposite  extreme :  3.  Plato,  and  Platonism :  4.  Aristotle  and  the  Peripa 
tetic  school :  5.  Zeno  and  Stoicism,  Epicurus  and  Epicureanism,  with  the 
effects  of  these  in  the  Roman  republic  and  empire  :  6.  The  rise  of  the  Ec 
lectic  or  Alexandrian  philosophy,  the  attempt  to  set  up  a  pseudo-Platonic 
polytheism  against  Christianity,  the  degradation  of  philosophy  itself  into 
mysticism  and  magic,  and  its  final  disappearance,  as  philosophy,  under  Jus 
tinian  :  7.  The  resumption  of  the  Aristotelian  philosophy  in  the  thirteenth 


4-22  THE    FRIEND. 

view  of  the  elder  philosophies,  which  must  be  ranked  among 
the  most  splendid  proofs  of  his  judgment  no  less  than  of  his 
genius,  and  more  expressly  in  the  critique  on  the  atomic  or 
corpuscular  doctrine  of  Dernocritus  and  his  followers  as  the  one 
extreme,  and  in  that  of  the  pure  rationalism  of  Zeno  the  Eleatic 
as  the  other,  Plato  has  proved  incontrovertibly  that  in  Loth  alike 
the  basis  is  too  narrow  to  support  the  superstructure  ;  that  the 
grounds  of  both  are  false  or  disputable  ;  and  that,  if  these  were 
conceded,  yet  neither  the  one  nor  the  other  scheme  is  adequate 
to  the  solution  of  the  problem, — namely,  wha^t  is  the  ground  of 
the  coincidence  between  reason  and  experience  ;  or  between  the 
laws  of  matter  and  the  ideas  of  the  pure  intellect.  The  only 
answer  which  Plato  deemed  the  question  capable  of  receiving, 
compels  the  reason  to  pass  out  of  itself  and  seek  the  ground  of 
this  agreement  in  a  supersensual  essence,  which  being  at  once 
the  ideal  of  the  reason  and  the  cause  of  the  material  world,  is 
the  pre-establisher  of  the  harmony  in  and  between  both.  Re 
ligion  therefore  is  the  ultimate  aim  of  philosophy,  in  consequence 
of  which  philosophy  itself  becomes  the  supplement  of  the  sciences, 
both  as  the  convergence  of  all  to  the  common  end,  namely  wis 
dom;,  and  as  supplying  the  copula,  which,  modified  in  each  in 
the  comprehension  of  its  parts  in  one  whole,  is  hi  its  principles 
common  to  all,  as  integral  parts  of  one  system.  And  this  is 
method,  itself  a  distinct  science,  the  immediate  offspring  of 
philosophy,  and  the  link  or  mordant  by  which  philosophy  be 
comes  scientific,  and  the  sciences  philosophical. 


ESSAY   VI. 

* 
fy)TSvT££  "koyov  t^odev  dvaipSci  "koyov. 

THE  second  relation  is  that  of  theory,  in  which  the  existing 
forms  and  qualities  of  objects,  discovered  by  observation  or  exper 
iment,  suggest  a  given  arrangement  of  many  under  one  point  of 
view  ;  and  this  not  merely  or  principally  in  order  to  facilitate  the 

century,  and  the  successive  re-appearance  of  the  different  ancient  sects 
from  the  restoration  of  literature  to  our  own  times. 


ESSAY    VI.  423 

remembrance,  recollection,  or  communication  of  the  same  ;  but 
for  the  purposes  of  understanding,  and  in  most  instances  of  con 
trolling  them.  In  other  words,  all  theory  supposes  the  general 
idea,  of  cause  and  effect.  The  scientific  arts  of  medicine,  chem 
istry,  and  physiology  in  general,  are  examples  of  a  method  hith 
erto  founded  on  this  second  sort  of  relation. 

Between  these  two  lies  the  method  in  the  fine  arts,  which  be 
longs  indeed  to  this  second  or  external  relation,  because  the  effect 
and  position  of  the  parts  is  always  moretor  less  influenced  by  the 
knowledge  and  experience  of  their  previous  qualities ;  but  which, 
nevertheless,  constitutes  a  link  connecting  the  second  form  of  re 
lation  with  the  first.  For  in  all  that  truly  merits  the  name  of 
poetry  in  its  most  comprehensive  sense,  there  is  a  necessary  pre 
dominance  of  the  ideas,  that  is,  of  that  which  originates  in  the 
artist  himself,  and  a  comparative  indifference  of  the  materials. 
A  true  musical  taste  is  soon  dissatisfied  with  the  harmonica  or 
any  similar  instrument  of  glass  or  steel,  because  the  body  of  the 
sound  (as  the  Italians  phrase  it),  or  that  effect  which  is  derived 
from  the  materials,  encroaches  too  far  on  the  effect  from  the  pro 
portions  of  the  notes,  or  that  which  is  given  to  music  by  the 
mind.  To  prove  the  high  value  as  well  as  the  superior  dignity 
of  the  first  relation,  and  to  evince,  that  on  this  alone  a  perfect 
method  can  be  grounded,  and  that  the  methods  attainable  by  the 
second  are  at  best  but  approximations  to  the  first,  or  tentative 
exercises  in  the  hope  of  discovering  it,  forms  the  first  object  of 
the  present  disquisition. 

These  truths  I  have  (as  the  most  pleasing  and  popular)mode 
of  introducing  the  subject)  hitherto  illustrated  from  Shakspeare. 
But  the  same  truths,  namely  the  necessity  of  a  mental  initiative 
to  all  method,  as  well  as  a  careful  attention  to  the  conduct  of  the 
mind  in  the  exercise  of  method  itself,  may  be  equally,  and  here, 
perhaps,  more  characteristically,  proved  from  the  most  familiar 
of  the  sciences.  We  may  draw  our  elucidation  even  from  those 
which  are  at  present  fashionable  among  us  ;  from  botany  or  from 
chemistry.  In  the  lowest  attempt  at  a  methodical  arrangement 
of  the  former  science,  that  of  artificial  classification  for  the  pre 
paratory  purpose  of  nomenclature,  some  antecedent  must  have 
been  contributed  by  the  mind  itself;  some  purpose  must  be  in 
view ;  or  some  question  at  least  must  have  been  proposed  to  na- 
ture,  grounded,  as  all  questions  are,  upon  some  idea  of  the 


424  THE    FRIEND. 

answer  ;  as  for  instance,  the  assumption  that — "  two  great  sexes 
animate  the  world."*  For  no  man  can  confidently  conceive  a 
fact  to  be  universally  true  who  does  not  with  equal  confidence 
anticipate  its  necessity,  and  who  does  not  believe  that  necessity 
to  be  demonstrable  by  an  insight  into  its  nature,  whenever  and 
wherever  such  insight  can  be  obtained.  We  acknowledge,  we 
reverence,  the  obligations  of  botany  to  Linnaeus,  who,  adopting 
from  Bartholinus,  Sebastian  Vaillant,  and  others,  the  sexuality  of 
plants,  grounded  there&n  a  scheme  of  classific  and  distinctive 
marks,  by  which  one  man's  experience  may  be  communicated  to 
others,  and  the  objects  safely  reasoned  on  while  absent,  and  rec 
ognized  as  soon  as  and  wherever  they  are  met  with.  He  in 
vented  a  universal  character  for  the  language  of  botany  charge 
able  with  no  greater  imperfections  than  are  to  be  found  in  the 
alphabets  of  every  particular  language.  As  for  the  study  of  the 
ancients,  so  for  that  of  the  works  of  nature,  an  accidence  and  a 
dictionary  are  the  first  and  indispensable  requisites  ;  and  to  the 
illustrious  Swede,  botany  is  indebted  for  both.  But  neither  was 
the  central  idea  of  vegetation  itself,  by  the  light  of  which  we 
might  have  seen  the  collateral  relations  of  the  vegetable  to  the  in 
organic  and  to  the  animal  world,  nor  the  constitutive  nature  arid 
inner  necessity  of  sex  itself,  revealed  to  Linnams. f  Hence,  as  in 

*  Par.  Lost,  viii.  151.— Ed. 

f  The  word  nature  has  been  used  in  two  senses,  actively  and  passively ; 
energetic,  or  forma  formans,  and  material,  or  forma  formata.  In  the  first 
(the  sense  in  which  the  word  is  used  in  the  text)  it  signifies  the  inward 
principle  of  whatever  is  requisite  for  the  reality  of  a  thing,  as  existent : 
while  the  essence  or  essential  property,  signifies  the  inner  principle  of  all 
that  appertains  to  the  possibility  of  a  thing.  Hence,  in  accurate  language, 
we  say  the  essence  of  a  mathematical  circle  or  other  geometrical  figure,  not 
the  nature ;  because  in  the  conception  of  forms  purely  geometrical  there  is 
no  expression  or  implication  of  their  real  existence.  In  the  second  or  mate 
rial  sense  of  the  word  nature,  we  mean  by  it  the  sum  total  of  all  things,  as 
far  as  they  are  objects  of  our  senses,  and  consequently  of  possible  experi 
ence  ;  the  aggregate  of  phenomena,  whether  existing  for  our  outward 
senses,  or  for  our  inner  sense.  The  doctrine  concerning  material  nature 
would  therefore  (the  word  physiology  being  both  ambiguous  in  itself,  and 
already  otherwise  appropriated)  be  more  properly  entitled  phsenomenol- 
ogy,  distinguished  into  its  two  grand  divisions,  somatology  and  psychology. 
The  doctrine  concerning  energetic  nature  is  comprised  in  the  science  of  dy 
namics  ;  the  union  of  which  with  phenomenology,  and  the  alliance  of  both 
with  the  sciences  of  the  possible,  or  of  the  conceivable,  namely,  logic  and 
mathematics,  constitute  natural  philosophy. 


ESSAY    VI.  425 

all  other  cases  where  the  master  light  is  missing1,  so  in  this,  the  re 
flective  mind  avoids  Scylla  only  to  lose  itself  in  CharjjDdis.  If  we 
adhere  to  the  general  notion  of  sex,  as  abstracted  from  the  more  ob 
vious  modes  and  forms  in  which  the  sexual  relation  manifests  itself, 
we  soon  meet  with  whole  classes  of  plants  to  which  it  is  found  in 
applicable.  If  arbitrarily,  we  give  it  indefinite  extension,  it  is  dis 
sipated  into  the  barren  truism,  that  all  specific  products  suppose 
specific  means  of  production.  Thus  a  growth  and  a  birth  are  dis 
tinguished  by  the  mere  verbal  definition,  that  the  latter  is  a  whole 
in  itself,  the  former  not :  and  when  we  would  apply  even  this  to 
nature,  we  are  baffled  by  objects  (the  flower  polypus,  for  example, 
and  many  others)  in  which  each  is  the  other.  All  that  can  be 
done  by  the  most  patient  and  active  industry,  by  the  widest  and 
most  continuous  researches  ;  all  that  the  amplest  survey  of  the 
vegetable  realm,  brought  under  immediate  contemplation  by  the 
most  stupendous  collections  of  species  and  varieties,  can  suggest ; 
all  that  minutest  dissection  and  exactest  chemical  analysis,  can 

Having  thus  explained  the  term  nature,  I  now  more  especially  entreat 
the  reader's  attention  to  the  sense  in  which  here,  and  everywhere  through 
this  essay,  I  use  the  word  idea.  I  assert,  that  the  very  impulse  to  univer 
salize  any  phenomenon  involves  the  prior  assumption  of  some  efficient  law 
in  nature,  which  in  a  thousand  different  forms  is  evermore  one  and  the 
same,  entire  in  each,  yet  comprehending  all,  and  incapable  of  being  ab 
stracted  or  generalized  from  any  number  of  phenomena,  because  it  is  itself 
pre-supposed  in  each  and  all  as  their  common  ground  and  condition,  and  be-* 
cause  every  definition  of  a  genus  is  the  adequate  definition  of  the  lowest 
species  alone,  while  the  efficient  law  must  contain  the  ground  of  all  in  all. 
It  is  attributed,  never  derived.  The  utmost  we  ever  venture  to  say  is,  that 
the  falling  of  an  apple  suggested  the  law  of  gravitation  to  Sir  I.  Newton. 
Now  a  law  and  an  idea  are  correlative  terms,  and  differ  only  as  object  and 
subject,  as  being  and  truth. 

Such  is  the  doctrine  of  the  Novum  Organum  of  Lord  Bacon,  agreeing  (as 
I  shall  more  largely  show  in  the  text)  in  all  essential  points  with  the  true 
doctrine  of  Plato,  the  apparent  differences  being  for  the  greater  part  occa 
sioned  by  the  Grecian  sage  having  applied  his  principles  chiefly  to  the  in 
vestigation  of  the  mind,  and  the  method  of  evolving  its  powers,  and  the 
English  philosopher  to  the  development  of  nature.  That  our  great  coun 
tryman  speaks  too  often  detractingly  of  the  divine  philosopher  must  be  ex 
plained,  partly  by  the  tone  given  to  thinking  minds  by  the  Reformation,  the 
founders  and  fathers  of  which  saw  in  the  Aristotelians,  or  schoolmen,  the 
antagonists  of  Protestantism,  and  in  the  Italian  Platonists  the  despisers  and 
secret  enemies  of  Christianity  itself;  and  partly,  by  his  having  formed  his 
notions  of  Plato's  doctrine  from  the  absurdities  and  phantasms  of  his  misin- 
terpreters,  rather  than  from  an  unprejudiced  study  of  the  original  works. 


426  THE    FRIEND. 

unfold  ;  all  that  varied  experiment  and  the  position  of  plants  and 
of  their  component  parts  in  every  conceivable  relation  to  light, 
heat  (and  whatever  else  we  distinguish  as  imponderable  sub 
stances),  to  earth,  air,  water,  to  the  supposed  constituents  of  air 
and  water,  separate  and  in  all  proportions — in  short,  all  that 
chemical  agents  and  re-agents  can  disclose  or  adduce  ; — all  these 
have  been  brought,  as  conscripts,  into  the  field,  with  the  com- 
pletest  accoutrement,  in  the  best  discipline,  under  the  ablest  com 
manders.  Yet  after  all  that  was  effected  by  Linna3us  himself, 
not  to  mention  the  labors  of  Gesner,^  Ca3salpinus,f  Ray,$  Tourne- 
fort,§  and  the  other  heroes  who  preceded  the  general  adoption  of 
the  sexual  system,  as  the  basis  of  artificial  arrangement ; — after 
all  the  successive  toils  and  enterprises  of  Hedwig,H  Jussieu,  Mir- 
bel,U  Sir  James  Smith,  Knight,  Ellis,  and  others, — what  is  bot 
any  at  this  present  hour  ?  Little  more  than  an  enormous  nomen 
clature  ;  a  huge  catalogue,  well  arranged,  and  yearly  and  monthly 
augmented,  in  various  editions,  each  with  its  own  scheme  of 
technical  memory  and  its  own  conveniences  of  reference.  A  dic 
tionary  in  which  (to  carry  on  the  metaphor)  an  Ainsworth  ar 
ranges  the  contents  by  the  initials ;  a  Walker  by  the  endings  ;  a 
Scapula  by  the  radicals ;  and  a  Cominius  by  the  similarity  of 
the  uses  and  purposes.  The  terms  system,  method,  science,  are 
mere  improprieties  of  courtesy,  when  applied  to  a  mass  enlarging 
*by  endless  appositions,  but  without  a  nerve  that  oscillates,  or  a 
pulse  that  throbs,  in  sign  of  growth  or  inward  sympathy.  The 
innocent  amusement,  the  healthful  occupation,  the  ornamental 
accomplishment  of  amateurs  (most  honorable  indeed  and  deserv 
ing  of  all  praise  as  a  preventive  substitute  for  the  stall,  the  ken 
nel,  and  the  subscription-room),  it  has  yet  to  expect  the  devotion 
and  energies  of  the  philosopher. 

*  Conrad  G-.  who  died  in  1568.    See  his  Letters. — Ed. 

•\  Libri  xv.  De  Plantis. — Ed. 

\MethodusPlantarum  nova.  1682.  Historia  Plantarum.  1686-7-1704. 
—Ed. 

%  Element  de  Botanique  ;  ou,  Methode  pour  connaitre  les  Plantes.  1694. 
—Ed. 

||  Theoria  generations*  el  fructificationis  plantarum  cryptogamtcarum 
Linnai.  1784-.  Cryptogamia.  1787. — Ed. 

^f  Histoire  generate  et  particuliere  des  plantes  ;  ou,  Traite  de  physiologie 
vegetale.  Exposition  de  la  theorie  de  T  organisation  vegetale.  1 805.  Ele- 
vnens  de  physiologie  vegetale  et  de  botanique.  1815. — Ed. 


ESSAY    VI.  427 

So  long  back  as  the  first  appearance  of  Dr.  Darwin's  PTiyto- 
logia,  I,  then*  in  earliest  manhood,  presumed  to  hazard  the  opin 
ion,  that  the  physiological  botanists  were  hunting  in  a  false 
direction,  and  sought  for  analogy  where  they  should  have  looked 
for  antithesis.  I  saw,  or  thought  I  saw,  that  the  harmony  be 
tween  the  vegetable  and  animal  world,  was  not  a  harmony  of 
resemblance,  but  of  contrast ;  and  that  their  relation  to  each 
other  was  that  of  corresponding  opposites.  They  seemed  to  rne, 
whose  mind  had  been  formed  by  observation,  unaided,  but  at  the 
same  time  unenthralled,  by  partial  experiment,  as  two  streams 
from  the  same  fountain  indeed,  but  flowing  the  one  due  west, 
and  the  other  direct  east,  and  that  consequently,  the  resemblance 
would  be  as  the  proximity,  greatest  in  the  first  and  rudimental  pro 
ducts  of  vegetable  and  animal  organization.  Whereas,  accord 
ing  to  the  received  notion,  the  highest  and  most  perfect  vege 
table,  and  the  lowest  and  rudest  animal  forms,  ought  to  have 
seemed  the  links  of  the  two  systems,  which  is  contrary  to  fact. 
Since  that  time,  the  same  idea  has  dawned  in  the  minds  of  philos 
ophers  capable  of  demonstrating  its  objective  truth  by  induction 
of  facts  in  an  unbroken  series  of  correspondences  in  nature. 
From  these  men,  or  from  minds  enkindled  by  their  labors,  we 
may  hope  hereafter  to  receive  it,  or  rather  the  yet  higher  idea  to 
which  it  refers  us,  matured  into  laws  of  organic  nature,  and 
thence  to  have  one  other  splendid  proof,  that  with  the  knowl 
edge  of  law  alon'e  dwell  power  and  prophecy,  decisive  experi 
ment,  and,  lastly,  a  scientific  method,  that  dissipating  with  its 
earliest  rays  the  gnomes  of  hypothesis  and  the  rnists  of  theory 
may,  within  a  single  generation,  open  out  on  the  philosophic  seer 
discoveries  that  had  baffled  the  gigantic,  but  blind  and  guideless, 
industry  of  ages. 

Such,  too,  is  the  case  with  the  assumed  indecomponible  sub 
stances  of  the  laboratory.  They  are  the  symbols  of  elementary 
powers,  and  the  exponents  of  a  law,  which,  as  the  root  of  all 
these  powers,  the  chemical  philosopher,  whatever  his  theory 
may  be,  is  instinctively  laboring  to  extract.  This  instinct,  again, 
is  itself  but  the  form,  in  which  the  idea,  the  mental  correlative 
of  the  law,  first  announces  its  incipient  germination  in  his  own 
mind  :  and  hence  proceeds  the  striving  after  unity  of  principle 
through  all  the  diversity  of  forms,  with  a  feeling  resembling  that 
*  1801.  JheZoonomia  was  published  in  1793.— Ed. 


428  THE    FRIEND. 

which  accompanies  our  endeavors  to  recollect  a  forgotten  name  ; 
when  we  seem  at  once  to  have  and  not  to  have  it ;  which  the 
memory  feels  but  can  not  find.  Thus,  as  "  the  lunatic,  the  lover, 
and  the  poet,"*  suggest  each  the  other  to  Shakspeare's  Theseus, 
as  soon  as  his  thoughts  present  to  him  the  one  form,  of  which 
they  are  but  varieties  ;  so  water  and  flame,  the  diamond,  the 
charcoal,  and  the  mantling  champagne,  with  its  ebullient  spar 
kles,  are  convoked  and  fraternized  by  the  theory  of  the  chemist. 
This  is,  in  truth,  the  first  charm  of  chemistry,  and  the  secret  of 
the  almost  universal  interest  excited  by  its  discoveries.  The 
serious  complacency  which  is  afforded  by  the  sense  of  truth, 
utility,  performance,  and  progression,  blends  with  and  ennobles 
the  exhilarating  surprise  and  the  pleasurable  sting  of  curiosity, 
which  accompany  the  propounding  and  the  solving  of  an  enigma. 
It  is  the  sense  of  a  principle  of  connection  given  by  the  mind, 
and  sanctioned  by  the  correspondency  of  nature.  Hence  the 
strong  hold  which  in  all  ages  chemistry  has  had  on  the  imagina 
tion.  If  in  Shakspeare  we  find  nature  idealized  into  poetry, 
through  the  creative  power  of  a  profound  yet  observant  medita 
tion,  so  through  the  meditative  observation  of  a  Davy,  a  Wollas- 
ton,  or  a  Hatchett ; 

By  some  connatural  force, 


Powerful  at  greatest  distance  to  unite 
With  secret  amity  things  of  like  kind, 

we  find  poetry,  as  it  were,  substantiated  and  realized  in  nature, — 

yea,  nature  itself  disclosed  to  us,  geminam  istam  naturam,  quce 

fit  etfacit,  et  creat  et  creatur,  as  at  once  the  poet  and  the  poem. 

*  Mids.  Night's  Dream,  act  v.  sc.  1. — Ed. 


ESSAY   VII. 


Tavry  TOIVVV  dtaipu  x&PlC  f*£v>  °^f  v^v  ^  e^eyef  <j>i%o6ed/Ltovd(;  re,  not 
,  KO.}  x^PL^  av  KEpt  ^v  o  Aoyof,  ovg  fiovovg  dv  Tig 

g  fj.lv  -ytyvcjaKovrag,  rivoq  e?iv  £Ktc?j/ 
TVOVTUV  TUV  tTUfrfauv,  6  ruy^avet  ov  a/t/lo  avr?^  Tr/g  ^rtf^^f  PLATO. 


In  the  following  then  I  distinguish,  first,  those  whom  you  indeed  may 
call  philotheorists,  or  philotechnists,  or  practicians,  and  secondly  those 
whom  alone  you  may  rightly  denominate  philosophers,  as  knowing  what 
the  science  of  all  these  branches  of  science  is,  which  may  prove  to  be  some 
thing  more  than  the  mere  aggregate  of  the  knowledge  in  any  particular 


FROM  Shakspeare  to  Plato,  from  the  philosophic  poet  to  the 
poetic  philosopher,  the  transition  is  easy,  and  the  road  is  crowded 
with  illustrations  of  our  present  subject.  For  of  Plato's  works, 
the  larger  and  more  valuable  portion  have  all  one  common  end, 
which  comprehends  and  shines  through  the  particular  purpose  of 
each  several  dialogue  ;  and  this  is  to  establish  the  sources,  to 
evolve  the  principles,  and  exemplify  the  art  of  method.  This  is 
the  clue,  without  which  it  would  be  difficult  to  exculpate  the 
noblest  productions  of  the  divine  philosopher  from  the  charge  of 
being  tortuous  and  labyrinthine  in  their  progress,  and  unsatisfac 
tory  in  their  ostensible  results.  The  latter  indeed  appear  not 
seldom  to  have  been  drawn  for  the  purpose  of  starting  a  new 
problem,  rather  than  that  of  solving  the  one  proposed  as  the  sub 
ject  of  the  previous  discussion.  But  with  the  clear  insight  that 
the  purpose  of  the  writer  is  not  so  much  to  establish  any  particu 
lar  truth,  as  to  remove  the  obstacles,  the  continuance  of  which  is 
preclusive  of  all  truth,  the  whole  scheme  assumes  a  different  as 
pect,  and  justifies  itself  in  all  its  dimensions.  We  see,  that  to 
open  anew  a  well  of  springing  water,  not  to  cleanse  the  stagnant 
tank,  or  fill,  bucket  by  bucket,  the  leaden  cistern  ;  that  the  educa 
tion  of  the  intellect,  by  awakening  the  principle  and  method  pf 


430  THE    FKIEND. 

self-development,  was  his  proposed  object,  not  any  specific  infor 
mation  that  can  be  conveyed  into  it  from  without  ;  —  not  to  assist 
in.  storing  the  passive  mind  with  the  various  sorts  of  knowledge 
most  in  request,  as  if  the  human  soul  were  a  mere  repository  or 
baiiqueting-room,  but  to  place  it  in  such  relations  of  circumstance 
as  should  gradually  excite  the  germinal  power  that  craves  no 
knowledge  but  what  it  can  take  up  into  itself,  what  it  can  appro 
priate,  and  reproduce  in  fruits  of  its  own.  To  shape,  to  dye,  to 
paint  over,  and  to  mechanize  the  mind,  he  resigned,  as  their 
proper  trade,  to  the  sophists,  against  whom  he  waged  open  and 
unremitting  war.  For  the  ancients,  as  well  as  the  moderns,  had 
their  machinery  for  the  extemporaneous  mintage  of  intellects,  by 
means  of  which,  off-hand,  as  it  were,  the  scholar  was  enabled  to 
make  a  figure  on  any  and  all  subjects,  on  any  and  all  occasions. 
They  too  had  their  glittering  vapors,  which  (as  the  comic  poet 
tells  us)  fed  a  host  of  sophists  — 


deal  dvdpdoiv  dpyolf, 
alirep  yvuftqv,  Kal  6idhe%iv,  not  vovv  fjfuv 
not  repareiav,  not  Trepihegtv,  not  Kpovaiv,  nac  /cara/l7?i/w.* 

Great  goddesses  are  they  to  lazy  folks, 
Who  pour  down  on  us  gifts  of  fluent  speech, 
Sense  most  sententious,  wonderful  fine  effect, 
And  how  to  talk  about  it  and  about  it, 
Thoughts  brisk  as  bees,  and  pathos  soft  and  thawy. 

In  fine,  as  improgressive  arrangement  is  not  method,  so  neither 
is  a  mere  mode  or  set  fashion  of  doing  a  thing.  Are  further  facts 
required  ?  I  appeal  to  the  notorious  fact  that  zoology,  soon  after 
the  commencement  of  the  latter  half  of  the  last  century,  was 
falling  abroad,  weighed  down  and  crushed,  as  it  were,  by  the  in 
ordinate  number  and  manifoldness  of  facts  and  phenomena  ap 
parently  separate,  without  evincing  the  least  promise  of  systema 
tizing  itself  by  any  inward  combination,  any  vital  interdependence, 
of  its  parts.  John  Hunter,  who  appeared  at  times  almost  a  stran 
ger  to  the  grand  conception,  which  yet  never  ceased  to  work  in 
him  as  his  genius  and  governing  spirit,  rose  at  length  in  the  hori 
zon  of  physiology  and  comparative  anatomy.  In  his  printed 
wodts,  the  one  directing  thought  seems  evermore  to  flit  before 
him,  twice  or  thrice  only  to  have  been  seized,  and  after  a  momen- 

*  Aristoph.  Nubes.  316,  &c.—Ed. 


ESSAY    VII.  431 

tary  detention  to  have  been  again  let  go  :  as  if  the  words  of  the 
charm  had  been  incomplete,  and  it  had  appeared  at  its  own  will 
only  to  mock  his  calling.  At -length,  in  the  astonishing  prepara 
tions  for  his  museum,  he  constructed  it  for  the  scientific  appre 
hension  out  of  the  unspoken  alphabet  of  nature.  Yet  notwith 
standing  the  imperfection  in  the  annunciation  of  the  idea,  how 
exhilarating  have  been  the  results  !  I  dare  appeal  to*  Aber- 
nethy,  to  Everard  Home,  to  Hatchett,  whose  communication  to 
•Sir  Everard  on  the  egg  and  its  analogies,  in  a  recent  paper  of  the 
latter  (itself  of  high  excellence)  in  the  Philosophical  Transactions, 
1  may  point  out  as  being,  in  the  proper  sense  of  the  term,  the  de 
velopment  of  a  fact  in  the  history  of  physiology,  and  to  which  I 
refer  as  exhibiting  a  luminous  instance  of  what  I  mean  by  the 
discovery  of  a  central  phenomenon.  To  these  I  appeal,  whether 
whatever  is  grandest  in  the  views  of  Cuvier  be  not  either  a  reflec 
tion  of  this  light  or  a  continuation  of  its  rays,  well  and  wisely 
directed  through  fit  media  to  the  appropriate  object,  f 

We  have  seen  that  a  previous  act  and  conception  of  the  mind 
is  indispensable  even  to  the  mere  semblances  of  method ;  that 
neither  fashion,  mode,  nor  orderly  arrangement  can  be  produced 
without  a  prior  purpose,  and  a  pre-cogitation  ad  intentioncm  cjus 
quod  quceritur,  though  this  purpose  may  have  been  itself  excited, 
and  this  pre-cogitation  itself  abstracted  from  the  perceived  like 
nesses  and  differences  of  the  objects  to  be  arranged.  But  it  has 
likewise  been  shown,  that  fashion,  mode,  ordonnance,  are  not 
method,  inasmuch  as  all  method  supposes  a  principle  of  unity 
with  progression  ;  in  other  words,  progressive  transition  without 
breach  of  continuity.  But  such  a  principle,  it  has  been  proved, 

*  Since  this  was  written,  Mr.  Abernethy  has  realized  this  anticipation, 
dictated  solely  by  my  wishes,  and  at  the  time  justified  only  by  my  general 
admiration  of  Mr.  A.'s  talents  and  principles,  and  composed  without  the 
least  knowledge  that  he  was  then  actually  engaged  in  proving  the  assertion 
here  hazarded,  at  large  and  in  detail.  See  his  eminent  Treatise  on  Physi 
ology,  1821. 

f  Nor  should  it  be  wholly  unnoticed,  that  Cuvier,  who,  I  understand, 
was  not  born  in  France,  and  is  not  of  unmixed  French  extraction,  had  pre 
pared  himself  for  his  illustrious  labors  (as  I  learn  from  a  reference  *in  the 
first  chapter  of  his  great  work,  and  should  have  concluded  from  the  general 
style  of  thinking,  though  the  language  betrays  suppression,  as  of  one  who 
doubted  the  sympathy  of  his  readers  or  audience)  in  a  very  different  school 
of  methodology  and  philosophy  than  any  which  Paris  could  have  afforded. 


432  THE    FRIEND. 

can  never  in  the  sciences  of  experiment  or  in  those  of  observation 
be  adequately  supplied  by  a  theory  built  on  generalization.  For 
what  shall  determine  the  mind  to  abstract  and  generalize  one 
common  point  rather  than  another  ; — and  within  what  limits", 
from  what  number  of  individual  objects,  shall  the  generalization 
be  made  ?  The  theory  must  still  require  a  prior  theory  for  its 
own  legitimate  construction.  With  the  mathematician  the  defi-> 
nition  makes  the  object,  and  pre-establishes  the  terms  which, 
and  which  alone,  can  occur  in  the  after-reasoning.  If  a  circle 
be  found  not  to  have  the  radii  from  the  centre  to  the  circumfer 
ence  perfectly  equal,  which  in  fact  it  would  be  absurd  to  expect 
of  any  material  circle,  it  follows  only  that  it  was  not  a  circle  ; 
and  the  tranquil  geometrician  would  content  himself  with  smil 
ing  at  the  quid  pro  quo  of  the  simple  objector.  A  mathemat 
ical  thcoria  seu  contemplatio  may  therefore  be  perfect.  For  the 
mathematician  can  be  certain  that  he  has  contemplated  all  that 
appertains  to  his  proposition.  The  celebrated  Euler,  treating  on 
some  point  respecting  arches,  makes  this  curious  remark  : — "  All 
experience  is  in  contradiction  to  this;  sed  potius  fidendum  est 
analyst ;  but  this  is  no  reason  for  doubting  the  analysis."  The 
words  sound  paradoxical ;  but  in  truth  mean  no  more  than  this, 
that  the  properties  of  space  are  not  less  certainly  the  properties 
of  space  because  they  can  never  be  entirely  transferred  to  mate- 
rial  bodies.  But  in  physics,  that  is,  in  all  the  sciences  which 
have  for  their  objects  the  things  of  nature,  and  not  the  entia  ra- 
tionis — more  philosophically,  intellectual  acts  and  the  products 
of  those  acts,  existing  exclusively  in  and  for  the  intellect  itself — 
the  definition  must  follow,  and  not  precede,  the  reasoning.  It  is 
representative  not  constitutive,  and  is  indeed  little  more  than  an 
abbreviature  of  the  preceding  observation,  and  the  deductions 
therefrom.  But  as  the  observation,  though  aided  by  experiment, 
is  necessarily  limited  and  imperfect,  the  definition  must  be  equally 
so.  The  history  of  theories,  and  the  frequency  of  their  subver 
sion  by  the  discovery  of  a  single  new  fact,  supply  the  best  illus 
trations  of  this  truth.* 

*  The  following  extract  from  a  most  respectable  scientific  Journal  con 
tains  an  exposition  of  the  impossibility  of  a  perfect  theory  in  physics,  the 
more  striking  because  it  is  directly  against  the  purpose  and  intention  of 
the  writer.  I  content  myself  with  one  question, — what  if  Kepler,  what  if 
Newton  in  his  investigations  concerning  the  tides,  had  holden  themselves 


ESSAY    VII.  -433 

As  little  can  a  true  scientific  method  be  grounded  on  an  hy 
pothesis,  unless  where  the  hypothesis  is  an  exponential  image  or 
picture-language  of  an  idea  which  is  contained  in  it  more  or 'less 
clearly ;  or  the  symbol  of  an  undiscovered  law,  like  the  charac 
ters  of  unknown  quantities  in  algebra,  for  the  purpose  of  submit 
ting  the  phenomena  to  a  scientific  calculus.  In  all  other  in 
stances,  it  is  itself  a  real  or  supposed  phenomenon,  and  there 
fore  a  part  of  the  problem  which  it  is  to  solve.  It  may  be 
among  the  foundation-stones  of  the  edifice,  but  can  never  be  the 
ground. 

But  in  experimental  philosophy,  it  may  be  said  how  much  do 
we  not  owe  to  accident  ?  Doubtless  :  but  let  it  not  be  forgotten, 
that  if  the  discoveries  so  made  stop  there  ;  if  they  do  not  excite 
some  master  idea  ;  if  they  do  riot  lead  to  some  law  (in  whatever 
dress  of  theory  or  hypothesis  the  fashions  and  prejudices  of  the 
time  may  disguise  or  disfigure  it) ; — the  discoveries  may  remain 
for  ages  limited  in  their  uses,  insecure  and  unproductive.  How 
many  centuries,  we  might  have  said  millennia,  have  passed,  since 
the  first  accidental  discovery  of  the  attraction  and  repulsion  of 

bound  to  this  canon,  and,  instead  of  propounding  a  law,  had  employed 
themselves  exclusively  in  collecting  materials  for  a  theory  ? 

"  The  magnetic  influence  has  long  been  known  to  have  a  variation  which 
is  constantly  changing ;  but  that  change  is  so  slow,  and  at  the  same  time  so 
different  in  various  parts  of  the  world,  that  it  would  be  in  vain  to  seek  for 
the  means  of  reducing  it  to  established  rules,  until  all  its  local  and  particu 
lar  circumstances  are  clearly  ascertained  and  recorded  by  accurate  observa 
tions  made  in  various  parts  of  the  globe.  The  necessity  and  importance 
of  such  observations  are  now  pretty  generally  understood,  and  they  have 
been  actually  carrying  on  for  some  years  past ;  but  these  (and  by  parity  of 
reason  the  incomparably  greater  number  that  remain  to  be  made)  must  be 
collected,  collated,  proved,  and  afterwards  brought  together  into  one  focus 
before  ever  a  foundation  can  be  formed  upon  which  any  thing  like  a  sound 
and  stable  theory  can  be  constituted  for  the  explanation  of  such  changes." 
Journal  of  Science  and  the  Arts,  No.  vii.  p.  103. 

An  intelligent  friend,  on  reading  the  words  "  into  one  focus,"  observed : 
"  But  what  and  where  is  the  lens  ?"  I  however  fully  agree  with  the  writer. 
All  this  and  much  more  must  have  been  achieved  before  "  a  sound  and  sta 
ble  theory"  could  be  "  constituted ;" — which  even  then  (except  as  far  as  it 
might  occasion  the  discovery  of  a  law)  might  possibly  explain  (ex  plicis 
plana  reddere),  but  never  account  for,  the  facts  in  question.  But  the  most 
satisfactory  comment  on  these  and  similar  assertions  would  be  afforded  by 
a  matter  of  fact  history  of  the  rise  and  progress,  the  accelerating  and  re 
tarding  momtnta,  of  science  in  the  civilized  world. 

VOL.  II.  T 


434:  THE    FRIEND. 

light  bodies  by  rubbed  amber  !  Compare  the  interval  with  the 
progress  made  within  less  than  a  century,  after  the  discovery  of 
the  phenomena  that  led  immediately  to  a  theory  of  electricity. 
That  here  as  in  many  other  instances,  the  theory  was  supported 
by  insecure  hypotheses  ;  that  by  one  theorist  two  heterogeneous 
fluids  are  assumed,  the  vitreous  and  the  resinous  ;  by  another,  a 
plus  and  minus  of  the  same  fluid  ;  that  a  third  considers  it  a 
mere  modification  of  light  ;  while  a  fourth  composes  the  electri 
cal  aura  of  oxygen,  hydrogen,  and  caloric  ; — this  does  but  place 
the  truth  we  have  been  evolving  in  a  stronger  and  clearer  light. 
For  abstract  from  all  these  suppositions,  or  rather  imaginations, 
that  which  is  common  to,  and  involved  in,  them  all  ;  and  we  shall 
have  neither  notional  fluid  or  fluids,  nor  chemical  compounds,  nor 
elementary  matter, — but  the  idea  of  two — opposite — forces,  tend 
ing  to  rest  by  equilibrium.  These  are  the  sole  factors  of  the  cal 
culus,  alike  in  all  the  theories.  These  give  the  law,  and  in  it  the 
method,  both  of  arranging  the  phenomena  and  of  substantiating 
appearances  into  facts  of  science  ;  with  a  success  proportionate  to 
the  clearness  or  confusedness  of  the  insight  into  the  law.  For 
this,  reason,  I  anticipate  the  greatest  improvements  in  the 
method,  the  nearest  approaches  to  a  system  of  electricity,  from 
these  philosophers,  who  have  presented  the  law  most  purely,  and 
the  correlative  idea  as  an  idea  ; — those,  namely,  who,  since  the 
year  1798,  in  the  true  spirit  of  experimental  dynamics,  rejecting 
the  imagination  of  any  material  substrate,  simple  or  compound, 
contemplate  in  the  phenomena  of  electricity  the  operation  of  a 
law  which  reigns  through  all  nature,  the  law  of  polarity,  or  the 
manifestation  of  one  power  by  opposite  forces  ; — who  trace  in 
these  appearances,  as  the  most  obvious  and  striking  of  its  innu 
merable  forms,  the  agency  of  the  positive  and  negative  poles  of  a 
power  essential  to  all  material  construction ;  the  second,  namely, 
of  the  three  primary  principles,  for  which  the  beautiful  and  most 
appropriate  symbols  are  given  by  the  mind  in  the  three  ideal  di 
mensions  of  space.* 

The  time  is,  perhaps,  nigh  at  hand,  when  the  same  comparison 
between  the  results  of  two  unequal  periods, — the  interval  be 
tween  the  knowledge  of  a  fact,  and  that  from  the  discovery  of 

*  "  Perhaps  the  attribution  or  analogy  may  seem  fanciful  at  first  sight, 
but  I  am  in  the  habit  of  realizing  to  myself  magnetism  as  length,  electricity 
as  breadth,  and  galvanism  as  depth."  '  Table  Talk,  VI.  284.— ^i 


ESSAY    VII.  435 

the  law, — will  be  applicable  to  the  sister  science  of  magnetism. 
But  how  great  the  contrast  between  magnetism  and  electricity  at 
the  present  moment  !  From  remotest  antiquity,  the  attraction  of 
iron  by  the  magnet  was  known  and  noticed ;  but,  century  aftei 
century,  it  remained  the  undisturbed  property  of  poets  and  ora 
tors.  The  fact  of  the  magnet  and  the  fable  of  the  phoenix  stood 
on  the  same  scale  of  utility.  In  the  thirteenth  century,  or  per 
haps  earlier,  the  polarity  of  the  magnet,  and  its  communicability 
to  iron,  were  discovered  ;  and  soon  suggested  a  purpose  so  grand 
and  important,  that  it  may  well  be  deemed  the  proudest  trophy 
ever  raised  by  accident*  in  the  service  of  mankind, — the  inven 
tion  of  the  compass.  But  it  led  to  no  idea,  to  no  law,  and  con 
sequently  to  no  method  :  though  a  variety  of  phcenomena,  as 
startling  as  they  are  mysterious,  have  forced  on  us  a  presentiment 
of  its  intimate  connection  with  all  the  great  agencies  of  nature  ; 
of  a  revelation,  in  ciphers,  the  key  to  which  is  still  wanting.  I 
can  recall  no  event  of  human  history  that  impresses  the  imagina 
tion  more  deeply  than  the  moment  when  Columbus,!  on  an  un- 

*  If  accident  it  were ;  if  the  compass  did  not  obscurely  travel  to  us  from 
the  remotest  east ;  if  its  existence  there  does  not  point  to  an  age  and  a  race, 
to  which  scholars  of  highest  rank  in  the  world  of  letters,  Sir  "W.  Jones, 
Builly,  Schlegel  have  attached  faith.  That  it  was  known  before  the  aera 
generally  assumed  for  its  invention,  and  not  spoken  of  as  a  novelty,  has  been 
proved  by  Mr.  South ey  and  others :  (See  the  Omniana,  vol.  i.  p.  210.  No. 
108, — where  Mr.  Southey  quotes  a  passage  from  the  Partidas  (1250-7), 
very  distinctly  referring  to  the  mariner's  needle. — Ed.} 

f  It  can  not  be  deemed  alien  from  the  purposes  of  this  disquisition,  if  I 
am  anxious  to  attract  the  attention  of  my  readers  to  the  importance  of 
speculative  meditation,  even  for  the  worldly  interests  of  mankind ;  and  to 
that  concurrence  of  nature  and  historic  event  with  the  great  revolutionary 
movements  of  individual  genius,  of  which  so  many  instances  occur  in  the 
study  of  history ; — to  point  out  how  nature,  or  that  which  in  nature  itself 
is  more  than  nature,  seems  to  come  forward  in  order  to  meet,  to  aid,  and  to 
reward  every  idea  excited  by  a  contemplation  of  her  methods  in  the  spirit 
of  filial  care,  and  with  the  humility  of  love.  It  is  with  this  view  that  I  ex 
tract  the  following  lines  from  an  ode  of  Chiabrera's,  which,  in  the  strength 
of  the  thought  and  the  lofty  majesty  of  the  poetry,  has  but  "  few  peers  in 
ancient  or  in  modern  song." 

Cerlo  da  cor,  ch"  alto  destin  non  scelse, 

Son  F  imprese  magnanime  neglette ; 

Ma  le  belV  alme  allc  beW  opre  elette 

Sanno  gioir  nellc  fatiche  eccelse  ; 

Ne  biasmo  popolar,  frale  catena, 

Spirto  d'  onore,  il  sno  cammin  raffrena. 


436  THE    FRIEND. 

known  ocean,   first  perceived  one  of  these  startling  facts,   the 
change  of  the  magnetic  needle. 

In  what  shall  we  seek  the  cause  of  this  contrast  between  the 
rapid  progress  of  electricity  and  the  stationary  condition  of  mag 
netism  ?  As  many  theories,  as  many  hypotheses,  have  been  ad 
vanced  in  the  latter  science  as  in  the  former.  But  the  theories 
and  fictions  of  the  electricians  contained  an  idea,  and  all  the  same 
idea,  which  has  necessarily  led  to  method  ;  implicit  indeed,  and 
only  regulative  hitherto,  but  which  requires  little  more  than  the 
dismission  of  the  imagery  to  become  constitutive  like  the  ideas 
of  the  geometrician.  On  the  contrary,  the  assumptions  of  the 
magnetists  (as  for  instance,  the  hypothesis  that  the  planet  itself  is 
one  vast  magnet,  or  that  an  immense  magnet  is  concealed  within 
it,  or  that  of  a  concentric  globe  within  the  earth,  revolving  on  its 
own  independent  axis),  are  but  repetitions  of  the  same  fact  or 
phenomenon  looked  at  through  a  magnifying  glass  ;  the  reitera 
tion  of  the  problem,  not  its  solution.  The  naturalist,  who  can 
not  or  will  not  see,  that  one  fact  is  often  worth  a  thousand,  as  in 
cluding  them  all  in  itself,  and  that  it  first  makes  all  the  other 
facts, — who  has  not  the  head  to  comprehend,  the  soul  to  rev 
erence,  a  central  experiment  or  observation  (what  the  Greeks 
would  perhaps  have  called  a  protophanomenon), — will  never  re 
ceive  an  auspicious  answer  from  the  oracle  of  nature. 

Cost  lunga  stagion  per  modi  indegni 

E'liropa  disprezzo  Vinclita  speme, 

Schernendo  il  vulgo  e  seco  i  regi  insieme, 

Nudo  nocchier  promcttitor  di  regni  ; 

Ma  per  le  sconosciute  onde  marine 

L'  invitta  prora  ei  pur  sospinse  alfine. 
Qual  uom,  che  torni  alia  gentil  consorte, 

Tal  ei  da  sua  magion  spiego  Vantenne  ; 

Ij  ocean  corse,  e  i  turbini  sostenne, 

Vinse  le  crude  immagini  di  morte  ; 

Poscia,  delV  arnpio  mar  spenta  la  guerra, 

Scorse  la  dianzi  favolosa  terra. 
Allor  dal  cavo  pin  scende  veloce, 

E  di  grand'  orma  il  nuovo  mondo  imprime  ; 

Ne  men  ratio  per  Taria  erge  sublime. 

Segno  del  del,  Pinsuperabil  croce  ; 

E  porge  umile  escmpio,  onde  adorarla 

Debba  sua  genie.  CHIABEEEA,  P.  L  12. 


ESSAY  VIII. 

The  soul  dotli  give 

Brightness  to  the  eye :  aud  some  say,  that  the  sun 
If  uot  enlighten'd  by  th'  Intelligence 
That  dotli  inhabit  it,  would  shine  no  more 
Than  a  dull  clod  of  earth. 

CABTWBIGHT'S  Lady-Errant,  act  iii.  sc.  iv. 

IT  is  strange,  yet  characteristic  of  the  spirit  that  was  at  work 
during  the  latter  half  of  the  last  century,  and  of  which  the' 
French  revolution  was,  I  hope,  the  closing  monsoon,  that  the 
writings  of  Plato  should  be  accused  of  estranging  the  mind  from 
sober  experience  and  substantial  matter  of  fact,  and  of  debauching 
it  by  fictions  and  generalities  ; — Plato,  whose  method  is  induct 
ive  throughout,  who  argues  on  all  subjects  not  only  from,  but  in 
and  by,  inductions  of  facts  ; — who  warns  us  indeed  against  that 
usurpation  of  the  senses,  which  quenching  the  lumen  siccum  of 
the  mind,  sends  it  astray  after  individual  cases  for  their  own 
sakes — against  that  tenuem  ct  manipularem  experientiam,  which 
remains  ignorant  even  of  the  transitory  relations,  to  which  the 
pauca  particularia  of  its  idolatry  not  seldom  owe  their  fluxional 
existence  ; — but  who  so  far  oftener,  and  with  such  unmitigated 
hostility,  pursues  the  assumptions,  abstractions,  generalities,  and 
verbal  legerdemain  of  the  sophists  !  Strange,  but  still  more 
strange,  that  a  notion  so  groundless  should  be  entitled  to  plead 
in  its  behalf  the  authority  of  Lord  Bacon,  from  whom  the  Latin 
words  in  the  preceding  sentence  are  taken,  and  whose  scheme  of 
logic,  as  applied  to  the  contemplation  of  nature,  is  Platonic 
throughout,  and  differing  only  in  the  mode,  which  in  Lord  Bacon 
is  dogmatic,  that  is,  assertory,  in  Plato  tentative,  arid  (to  adopt 
the  Socratic  phrase)  obstetric.  I  am  not  the  first,  or  even  among 
the  first,  who  have  considered  Bacon's  studied  depreciation  of  the 
ancients,  with  his  silence,  or  worse  than  silence,  concerning  the 
merits  of  his  contemporaries,  as  the  least  amiable,  the  least  ex- 


438  THE    FRIEND. 

hilarating,  side  in  the  character  of  our  illustrious  countryman. 
His  detractions  from  the  divine  Plato  it  is  more  easy  to  explain 
than  to  justify  or  even  to  palliate  ;  and  that  he  has  merely  re 
taliated  Aristotle's  own  unfair  treatment  of  his  predecessors  and 
contemporaries,  may  lessen  the  pain,  but  should  not  blind  us  to 
the  injustice  of  the  aspersions  on  the  name  and  works  of  that 
philosopher.  The  most  eminent  of  our  recent  zoologists  and 
mineralogists  have  acknowledged  with  respect,  and  even  with 
expressions  of  wonder,  the  performances  of  Aristotle,  as  the  first 
clearer  and  breaker-up  of  the  ground  in  natural  history.  It  is 
indeed  scarcely  possible  to  peruse  the  treatise  on  colors,*  falsely 
ascribed  to  Theophrastus,  the  scholar  and  successor  of  Aristotle, 
after  a  due  consideration  of  the  state  and  means  of  science  at 
that  time,  without  resenting  the  assertion,  that  he  had  utterly 
enslaved  his  investigations  in  natural  history  to  his  own  system 
"'of  logic  (logiccB  sucz  prorsus  mancipavit.)^  Nor  let  it  be  for 
gotten  that  the  sunny  side  of  Lord  Bacon's  character  is  to  be 
found  neither  in  his  inductions,  nor  in  the  application  of  his  own 
method  to  particular  phenomena  or  particular  classes  of  physi 
cal  facts,  which  are  at  least  as  crude*  for  the  age  of  Gilbert, $ 
Galileo,  and  Kepler,  as  Aristotle's  for  that  of  Philip  and  Alexan 
der.  Nor  is  it  to  be  found  in  his  recommendation  (which  is 
wholly  independent  of  his  inestimable  principles  of  scientific 
method)  of  tabular  collections  of  particulars.  Let  any  unpreju 
diced  naturalist  turn  to  Lord  Bacon's  questions  and  proposals  for 
the  investigation  of  single  problems  ;  to  his  Discourse  on  the 
Winds  ;  or  to  the  almost  comical  caricature  of  this  scheme  in  the 
Method  of  improving  Natural  Philosophy,  by  Robert  Hooke  (the 
history  of  wrhose  multifold  inventions,  and  indeed  of  his  whole 
philosophical  life,  is  the  best  answer  to  the  scheme,  if  a  scheme 
so  palpably  impracticable  needs  any  answer), — and  put  it  to  his 
conscience,  whether  any  desirable  end  could  be  hoped  for  from 
such  a  process;  or  inquire  of  his  own  experience,  or  historical 
recollections,  whether  any  important  discovery  was  ever  made  in 
this  way.§  For  though  Bacon  never  so  far  deviates  from  his 

*  The  Ilepl  Xpw/zarwv  is  not  now,  I  believe,  considered  genuine. — Ed. 

f  Nov.  Org.  Aph.  LIV. 

j  William  Gilbert  died  in  1603.  His  works  are  De  Magnete,  <fec.  1600, 
and  De  Mundo,  &G.  U5l.—Ed. 

§  I  refer  the  reader  to  Hooke's  Posthumous  Works  (Hooke  died  in  1702. 
— Ed.)  published  under  the  auspices  of  the  Royal  Society,  by  their  Secre- 


ESSAY    VIII.  439 

own  principles,  as  not  to  admonish  the  reader  that  the  particu 
lars  are  to  be  thus  collected,  only  that  by  careful  selection  they 
may  be  concentrated  into  universals ;  yet  so  immense  is  their 
number,  and  so  various  and  almost  endless  the  relations  in  which 
each  is  to  be  separately  considered,  that  the  life  of  an  antedilu 
vian  patriarch  would  have  been  expended,  and  his  strength  and 
spirits  wasted,  in  merely  polling-  the  votes,  and  long  before  he 
could  have  commenced  the  process  of  simplification,  or  have  ar 
rived  in  sight  of  the  law  which  was  to  reward  the  toils  of  the 
over -tasked  Psyche.*" 

tary,  Richard  Waller,  and  especially  to  the  pages  from  p.  22  to  42  inclu 
sive,  as  containing  tke  preliminary  knowledge  requisite  or  desirable  for  the 
naturalist,  before  he  can  form  "  even  a  foundation  upon  which  any  thing 
like  a  sound  and  stable  theory  can  be  constituted."  As  a  small  specimen 
of  this  appalling  catalogue  of  preliminaries  with  which  he  is  to  make  him 
self  conversant,  take  the  following  : — The  history  of  potters,  tobacco-pipe- 
makers,  glaziers,  glass-grinders,  looking-glass-makers  or  foilers,  spectacle- 
makers  and  optie-glass-makers,  makers  of  counterfeit  pearl  and  precious 
stones,  bugle-makers,  lamp-blowers,  color-makers,  color-grinders,  glass- 
painters,  enamellers,  varnishers,  color -sellers,  painters,  limners,  picture- 
drawers,  makers  of  baby -heads,  of  little  bowling-stones  or  marbles,  fustian- 
makers  (quccre  •whether  poets  are  included  in  this  trade)  music-masters, 
tinsey-makere,  and  taggers  ; — the  history  of  schoolmasters,  writing-masters, 
printers,  book-binders,  stage-players,  dancing-masters,  and  vaulters,  apothe 
caries,  chirurgeons,  seamsters,  butchers,  barbers,  laundresses,  and  cosmetics, 
<fce.  (the  true  nature  of  which  being  actually  determined)  will  hugely  facili 
tate  our  inquiries  in  philosophy. 

As  a  summary  of  Dr.  R.  Hooke's  multifarious  recipe  for  the  growth  of 
science  may  be  fairly  placed  that  of  the  celebrated  Dr.  Watts  for  the  im 
provement  of  the  mind,  which  was  thought  by  Dr.  Knox  to  be  worthy  of 
insertion  in  the  Elegant  Extracts,  voL  ii.  p.  456,  under  the  head  of 

DIRECTIONS    CONCERNING   OUR    IDEAS. 

"  Furnish  yourselves  with  a  rich  variety  of  ideas.  Acquaint  yourselves 
with  things  ancient  and  modern ;  things  natural,  civil,  and  religious ;  things 
of  your  native  land,  and  of  foreign  countries ;  things  domestic  and  national ; 
things  present,  past,  and  future ;  and  above  all,  be  well  acquainted  with 
God  and  yourselves ;  with  animal  nature,  ami  the  workings  of  your  own 
spirits.  Such  a  general  acquaintance  with  things  will  be  of  very  great 
advantage." 

*  See  the  beautiful  allegoric  tale  of  Cupid  and  Psyche,  in  the  original 
of  Apuleius,  (De  Asino  aureo,  L.  iv.  v.  vi. — Ed.)  The  tasks  imposed  on  her 
by  the  jealousy  of  her  mother-in-law,  and  the  agency  by  which  they  are  at 
length  self-performed,  arc  noble  instances  of  that  bidden  wisdom,  "where 
more  is  meant  than  meets  the  ear," 


440  THE     FRIEND. 

I  yield  to  none  in  grateful  veneration  of  Lord  Bacon's  philo 
sophical  writings.  I.  am  proud  of  his  very  name,  as  a  lover  of 
knowledge  ;  and  as  an  Englishman,  I  am  almost  vain  of  it. 
But  I  may  not  permit  the  honest  workings  of  national  attach 
ment  to  degenerate  into  the  jealous  and  indiscriminate  partiality 
of  clanship.  Unawed  by  such  as  praise  and  abuse  by  wholesale, 
I  dare  avow  that  there  are  points  in  the  character  of  our  Veru- 
lam,  from  which  I  turn  to  the  life  and  labors  of  John  Kepler,*  a^s 
from  gloom  to  sunshine.  The  beginning  and  the  close  of  his  life 
were  clouded  by  poverty  and  domestic  troubles,  while  the  inter 
mediate  years  were  comprised  within  the  most  tumultuous  period 
of  the  history  of  his  country,  when  the  furies  of  religious  and  po 
litical  discord  had  left  neither  eye,  ear,  nor  heart  for  the  muses. 
But  Kepler  seemed  bom  to  prove  that  true  genius  can  overpower 
all  obstacles.  If  he  gives  an  account  of  his  modes  of  proceeding, 
and  of  the  views  under  which  they  first  occurred  to  his  mind, 
how  unostentatiously  and  in  transitu,  as  it  were,  does  he  intro 
duce  himself  to  our  notice  ;  and  yet  never  fails  to  present  the 
living  germ  out  of  which  the  genuine  method,  as  the  inner  form 
of  the  tree  of  science,  springs  up  !  With  what  affectionate  rever 
ence  does  he  express  himself  of  his  master  and  immediate  prede 
cessor,  Tycho  Brahe  ;  with  what  zeal  does  he  vindicate  his  ser 
vices  against  posthumous  detraction  !  How  often  and  how  glad 
ly  does  he  speak  of  Copernicus  ; — and  with  what  fervent  tones 
of  faith  and  consolation  does  he  proclaim  the  historic  fact  that 
the  great  men  of  all  ages  have  prepared  the  way  for  each  other, 
as  pioneers  and  hqralds  !  Equally  just  to  the  ancients  and  to 
his  contemporaries,  how  circumstantially,  and  with  what  exact 
ness  of  detail,  does  Kepler  demonstrate  that  Euclid  Copernicizes — 
&s  TTQO  KoTisQi'ixov  xoTtsQivxi'^ei  EvxXsidrjg, — how  elegant  the  com 
pliments  which  he  addresses  to  Porta,  and  with  what  cordiality 
he  thanks  him  for  the  invention  of  the  camera  obscura,  as  en 
larging  his  views  into  the  laws  of  vision  !  But  while  I  can  not 
avoid  contrasting  this  generous  enthusiasm  with  Lord  -Bacon's 
cold  and  invidious  treatment  of  Gilbert,  and  his  assertion  that  the 
works  of  Plato  and  Aristotle  had  been  carried  down  the  stream 
of  time,  like  straws,  by  their  levity  alone,  when  things  of  weight 
and  worth  had  sunk  to  the  bottom  ; — still  in  the  founder  of  a  rev- 

*  Born  1571,  ten  years  after  Lord  Bacon:  died  1630,  four  years  after 
the  death  of  Bacon. 


ESSAY    VIII.  441 

olution,  scarcely  less  important  for  the  scientific,  and  even  for 
the  commercial,  world  than  that  of  Luther  for  the  world  of  reli 
gion  and  politics,  we  must  allow  much  to  the  heat  of  protesta 
tion,  much  to  the  vehemence  of  hope,  and  much  to  the  vividness 
of  novelty.  Still  more  must  we  attribute  to  the  then  existing 
and  actual  state  of  the  Platonic  and  Peripatetic  philosophies,  or 
rather  to  the  dreams  or  verbiage  which  then  passed  current  as 
such.  Had  Bacon  but  attached  to  their  proper  authors  the 
schemes  and  doctrines  which  he  condemns,  our  illustrious  coun 
tryman  would,  in  this  point,  at  least,  have  needed  no  apology. 
And  surely  no  lovor  of  truth,  conversant  with  the  particulars  of 
Lord  Bacon's  life,  with  the  very  early,  almost  boyish,  age  at 
which  he  quitted  the  university,  and  the  manifold  occupations 
and  anxieties  in  which  his  public  and  professional  duties  engaged, 
and  his  courtly, — alas  !  his  servile,  prostitute,  and  mendicant — 
ambition  entangled  him,  in  his  after-years,  Avill  be  either  sur 
prised  or  offended,  though  I  should  avow  my  conviction,  that  he 
had  derived  his  opinions  of  Plato  and  Aristotle  from  any  source, 
rather  than  from  a  dispassionate  and  patient  study  of  the  origi 
nals  themselves.  At  all  events  it  will  be  no  easy  task  to  recon 
cile  many  passages  in  the  De  Augmentis,  and  the  Redargutio 
Philosophiarum,  with  the  author's  own  fundamental  principles, 
as  established  in  his  Novum  Organum  ;  if  we  attach  to  the 
words  the  meaning  which  they  may  bear,  or  even,  in  some  in 
stances,  the  meaning  which  might  appear  to  us,  in  the  present 
age,  more  obvious  ;  instead  of  the  sense  in  which  they  were  em 
ployed  by  the  professors,  whose  false  premises  and  barren  meth 
ods  Bacon  was  at  that  time  controverting.  And  this  historical 
interpretation  is  rendered  the  more  necessary  by  his  fondness  for 
point  and  antithesis  in  his  style,  where  we  must  often  disturb  the 
sound  in  order  to  arrive  at  the  sense.  But  with  these  precau 
tions  ; — and  if,  in  collating  the  philosophical  works  of  Lord  Ba 
con  with  those  of  Plato,  we,  in  both  cases  alike,  separate  the 
grounds  and  essential  principles  of  their  philosophic  systems  from 
the  inductions  themselves  ;  no  inconsiderable  portion  of  which, 
in  the  British  sage,  as  well  as  in  the  divine  Athenian,  is  neither 
more  nor  less  crude  and  erroneous  than  might  be  anticipated 
from  the  infant  state  of  natural  history,  chemistry,  and  physiol 
ogy,  in  their  several  ages;  and  if  we  moreover  separate  the 
principles  from  their  practical  application,  which  in  both  is  not 

T* 


442  THE    FRIEND. 

seldom  impracticable,  and,  in  our  countryman,  not  always  recon 
cilable  with  the  principles  themselves  ; — we  shall  not  only  ex 
tract  that  from  each  which  is  for  all  ages,  and  which  constitutes 
their  true  systems  of  philosophy,  but  shall  convince  ourselves  that 
they  are  radically  one  and  the  same  system  ; — in  that,  namely, 
which  is  of  universal  and  imperishable  worth,  the  science  of 
method,  and  the  grounds  and  conditions  of  the  science  of  method. 


ESSAY   IX. 

A  great  authority  may  be  a  poor  proof,  but  it  is  an  excellent  presump 
tion  :  and  few  things  give  a  wise  man  a  truer  delight  than  to  reconcile  two 
great  authorities,  that  had  been  commonly  but  falsely  held  to  be  dissonant. 

STAPYLTON. 

UNDER  a  deep  impression  of  the  importance  of  the  truths  I 
have  essayed  to  develop,  I  would  fain  remove  every  prejudice 
that  does  not  originate  in  the  heart  rather  than  in  the  understand 
ing.  For  truth,  says  the  wise  man,  will  not  enter  a  malevolent 
spirit. 

To  offer  or  to  receive  names  in  lieu  of  sound  arguments,  is  only 
less  reprehensible  than  an  ostentatious  contempt  of  the  great  men 
of  former  ages ;  but  we  may  well  and  wisely  avail  ourselves  of 
authorities,  in  confirmation  of  truth,  and  above  all,  in  the  removal 
of  prejudices  founded  on  imperfect  information.  I  do  not  see, 
therefore,  how  I  can  more  appropriately  conclude  this  first,  ex 
planatory  and  controversial  section  of  the  inquiry,  than  by  a 
brief  statement  of  our  renowned  countryman's  own  principles  of 
method,  conveyed  for  the  greater  part  in  his  own  words.  Nor 
do  I  see,  in  what  more  precise  form  I  can  recapitulate  the  sub 
stance  of  the  doctrines  asserted  and  vindicated  in  the  preceding 
pages.  For  I  rest  my  strongest  pretensions  to  a  calm  and  respect 
ful  perusal,  in  the  first  instance,  on.  the  fact,  that  I  have  only  re- 
proclaimed  the  coinciding  prescripts  of  the  Athenian  Verulam, 
arid  the  British  Plato — genuinam  scilicet  Platonis  dialecticcm, 
et  methodologiam  principialem. 


ESSAY    IX.  443 


FRANC  ISC  t    DE    VERULAMIO. 

Ill  the  first  instance,  Lord  Bacon  equally  with  myself  demands 
what  I  have  ventured  to  call  the  intellectual  or  mental  initia 
tive,  as  the.  motive  and  guide  of  every  philosophical  experiment  ; 
some  well-grounded  purpose,  some  distinct  impression  of  the 
probable  results,  some  self-consistent  anticipation  as  the  ground 
of  the  prudcns  quccstio,  the  forethoughtful  query,  which  he 
affirms  to  be  the  prior  half  of  the  knowledge  sought,  dimidium 
scientice.  With  him,  therefore,  as  with  me,  an  idea  is  an  experi 
ment  proposed,  an  experiment  is  an  idea  realized.  For  so, 
though  in  other  words,  he  himself  informs  us  :  ncquc  id  molimur 
tarn  instrumentis  quani  experimentis ;  ctenim  expcrimentorum 
longe  major  cst  subtilitas  quam  sensus  ipaius,  licet  instruments 
exquisitis  adjuti.  De  Us  loquimur  experimentis,  quce  ad  inten- 
tionem  ejus  quod  quceritur  perite  et  sccundum  artem  excogitata  et 
apposita  sunt.  Itaque  perceptions  sensus  immediatce  ac  pi'opria 
-non  midtum  tribuimus :  sed  eo  rein  deducimus,  ut  sensus  tantum 
de  expcrimento,  cxperimentum  de  re,  judicet.  This  last  sentence 
is,  as  the  attentive  reader  will  have  himself  detected,  one  6f  those 
faulty  verbal  antitheses  not  unfrequent  in  Lord  Bacon's  writings. 
Pungent  antitheses,  and  the  analogies  of  wit  in  which  the  resem 
blance  is  too  often  more  indebted  to  the  double  or  equivocal 
sense  of  a  word,  than  to  any  real  conformity*  in  the  thing  or 
image,  form  the  didcia  vitia  of  his  style,  the  Dalilahs  of  our 
philosophical  Samson.  But  in  this  instance,  as  indeed  throughout 
all  his  works,  the  meaning  is  clear  and  evident ; — namely,  that 
the  sense  can  apprehend,  through  the  organs  of  sense,  only  the 
plucnomcim  evoked  by  the  experiment :  vis  vero  mentis  ea,  quce 
experimentum  excogitaverat,  de  re  judicet :  that  is,  that  power, 
which  out  of  its  owrn  conceptions  had  shaped  the  experiment, 
must  alone  determine  the  true  import  of  the  pli&nomena.  If 
again  we  ask,  what  it  is  which  gives  birth  to  the  question,  and 
then  ad  intentioncm  qucestionis  suce  experimentum  cxcogitat, 
undede  re  judicet,  the  answer  is, — luxintellcctus,  lumen  siccum, 
the  pure  and  impersonal  reason,  freed  from  all  the  various  idols 

*  Thus  (to  take  the  first  instance  that  occurs),  Bacon  says,  that  some 
knowledges,  like  the  stars,  are  so  high  that  they  give  no  light.  Where  the 
•word,  "  high,"  means  "  deep  or  sublime,"  in  the  one  case,  and  "  distant"  in 
the  other. 


444  THE    FRIEND. 

enumerated  by  our  great  legislator  of  science  (idola  trifrus,  specus, 
fori,  thcatri) ;  that  is,  freed  from  the  limits,  the  passions,  the 
prejudices,  the  peculiar  habits  of  the  human .  understanding, 
natural  or  acquired  ;  but  above  all,  pure  from  the  arrogance, 
which  leads  man  to  take  the  forms  and  mechanism  of  his  own 
mere  reflective  faculty,  as  the  measure  of  nature  and  of  Deity. 
In  this  indeed  we  find  the  great  object  both  of  Plato's  and  of  Lord 
Bacon's  labors.  They  both  saw  that  there  could  be  no  hope  of 
any  fruitful  and  secure  method,  while  forms,  merely  subjective, 
were  presumed  as  the  true  and  proper  moulds  of  objective  truth. 
This  is  the  sense  in  which  Lord  Bacon  uses  the  phrases,  intellec- 
tus  hum  anus,  mem  hominis,  so  profoundly  and  justly  char 
acterized  in  the  preliminary  essay  to  the  Novum  Organum.* 
And  with  all  right  and  propriety  did  he  so  apply  them :  for 
this  was,  in  fact,  the  sense  in  which  the  phrases  were  applied  by 
the  teachers,  whom  he  is  controverting  ;  by  the  doctors  of  the 
schools,  and  the  visionaries  of  the  laboratory.  To  adopt  the  bold 
but  happy  phrase  of  a  late  ingenious  French  writer,  it  is  the 
homme  particuli&r,  as  contrasted  with  Vliomme  general,  against 
which,.  Heraclitus  and  Plato,  among  the  ancients,  and  among  the 
moderns,  Bacon  and  Stewart  (rightly  understood),  warn  and  pre- 
admonish  the  sincere  inquirer.  Most  truly,  and  in  strict  conso 
nance  with  his  two  great  predecessors,  does  our  immortal  Yeru- 
lam  teach,  that  the  human  understanding,  even  independently 
of  the  causes  that  always,  previously  to  its  purification  by  philos 
ophy,  render  it  more  or  less  turbid  or  uneven,  sicut  speculum 
inccquale  rerum  radios  ex  figura  et  sectione  propria  immutat  ;f 
that  our  understanding  not  only  reflects  the  objects  subjectively, 
that  is,  substitutes  for  the  inherent  laws  and  properties  of  the  ob 
jects  the  relations  which  the  objects  bear  to  its  own  particular 
constitution  ;  but  that  in  all  its  conscious  presentations  and  re 
flexes,  it  is  itself  only  a  pJicenomcnon  of  the  inner  sense,  and  re 
quires  the  same  corrections  as  the  appearances  transmitted  by  the 
outward  senses.  But  that  there  is  potentially,  ilftot  actually,  in 
every  rational  being,  a  somewhat,  call  it  what  you  will,  the  pure 
reason,  the  spirit,  lumen  siccum,  vovg,  q>w$  roegov,  intellectual 
intuition,  or  the  like, — and  that  in  this  are  to  be  found  the  indis 
pensable  conditions  of  all  science,  and  scientific  research,  whether 
meditative,  contemplative,  or  experimental, — is  often  expressed, 
*  Distributio  Operis. — Ed.  •}•  Nov.  Org.  Distrib.  Operis. — Ed. 


ESSAY    IX.  445 

and  everywhere  supposed,  by  Lord  Bacon.  And  that  this  is  not 
only  the  right  but  the  possible  nature  of  the  human  mind,  to 
which  it  is  capable  of  being  restored,  is  implied  in  the  various 
remedies  prescribed  by  him  for  its  diseases,  and  in  the  various 
means  of  neutralizing  or  converting  into  useful  instrumentality 
the  imperfections  which  can  not  be  removed.  There  is  a  sublime 
truth  contained  in  his  favorite  phrae,  idola  intcllectus.  He  thus 
tells  us,  that  the  mind  of  man  is  an  edifice  not  built  with  human 
hands,  which  needs  only  be  purged  of  its  idols  and  idolatrous  ser 
vices  to  become  the  temple  of  the  true  and  living  Light.  Nay, 
he  has^hown  and  established  the  true  criterion  between  the  ideas 
and  the  idola  of  the  mind  ;  namely,  that  the  former  are  mani 
fested  by  their  adequacy  to  those  ideas  in  nature,  which  in  and 
through  them  are  contemplated.  Non  leve  quiddam  interest 
inter  humana  mentis  idola  et  divines  mentis  ideas,  hoc  est,  in 
ter  placita  qucedam  inania  et  veras  signaturas  atque  impres- 
sionesfactas  in  creaturis,  prout  inveniuntur  .*  Thus  the  dif 
ference,  or  rather  distinction,  between  Plato  and  Lord  Bacon  is 
simply  this :  that  philosophy  being  necessarily  bipolar,  Plato 
treats  principally  of  the  truth,  as  it  manifests  itself  at  the  ideal 
pole,  as  the  science  of  intellect  (de  mundo  intclligibili) ;  while 
Bacon  confines  himself,  for  the  most  part,  to  the  same  truth,  as 
it  is  manifested  at  the  other  or  material  pole,  as  the  science  of 
nature  (de  mundo  sensibili).  It  is  as  necessary,  therefore,  that 
Plato  should  direct  his  inquiries  chiefly  to  those  objective  truths 
that  exist  in  and  for  the  intellect  alone,  the  images  and  represen 
tatives  of  which  we  construct  for  ourselves  by  figure,  number, 
and  word  ;  as  that.  Lord  Bacon  should  attach  his  main  concern 
to  the  truths  which  have  their  signatures  in  nature,  and  which 
(as  he  himself  plainly  and  often  asserts)  may  indeed  be  revealed 
to  us  through  and  with,  but  never  by  the  senses,  or  the  faculty 
of  sense.  Otherwise,  indeed,  instead  of  being  more  objective  than 
the  former  (which  they  are  not  in  any  sense,  both  being  in  this 
respect  the  same),  they  would  be  less  so;  and,  in  fact,  incapable 
of  being  insulated  from  the  idola  tribus  (qucz)  snnt  fundata  in 
ipsa  natura  humana,  atque  in  ipsa  tribu  seu  gente  hominum. 
Falso  enim  asseritur  sensum  humanum  esse  mensuram  rerum  ; 
quin  contra,  omnes  perceptiones  tarn  senszts  quam  mentis,  sunt 

*  Nov.  Org.  P.  II.  Summ.  2B.—M. 


446  THE    FRIEND. 

ex  analogia  hominis,  non  ex  analogia  universi.*  Hence  too,  it 
will  not  surprise  us,  that  Plato  so  often  calls  ideas  living  laws,  in 
which  the  mind  has  its  whole  true  being  and  permanence  ;  or 
that  Bacon,  vice  versa,  names  the  laws  of  nature  ideas  ;  and 
represents  what  I  have  in  a  former  part  of  this  disquisition  called 
facts  of  science  and  central  ph&nomena,  as  signatures,  impres 
sions,  and  symbols  of  ideas.  A  distinguishable  power  self-af 
firmed,  and  seen  in  its  unity  with  the  Eternal  Essence,  is,  ac 
cording  to  Plato,  an  idea  :  and  the  discipline,  by  which  the  hu 
man  mind  is  purified  from  its  idols  (ettfwAa),  and  raised  to  the 
contemplation  of  ideas,  and  thence  to  the  secure  and  ever-pro 
gressive,  though  never-ending,  investigation  of  truth  and  reality 
by  scientific  method,  comprehends  what  the  same  philosopher  so 
highly  extols  under  the  title  of  dialectic.  According  to  Lord  Ba 
con,  as  describing  the  same  truth  seen  from  the  opposite  point, 
and  applied  to  natural  philosophy,  an  idea  would  be  defined  as — 
intuitlo  sive  inventio,  quce  in  perceptions  sensus  non  est  (ut  quce 
puree  et  sicci  luminis  intellectioni  est  propria)  idearum  divines, 
mentis,  prout  in  creaturis  per  signaturas  suas  sese  patefaciant. 
"  That  (saith  the  judicious  Hooker)  which  doth  assign  unto  each 
thing  the  kind,  that  which  doth  moderate  the  force  and  power, 
that  which  doth  appoint  the  form  and  measure,  of  working,  the 
same  we  term  a  law."f 

We  can  now,  as  men  furnished  with  fit  and  respectable  cre 
dentials,  proceed  to  the  historic  importance  and  practical  appli 
cation  of  method,  under  the  deep  and  solemn  conviction,  that 
without  this  guiding  light  neither  can  the  sciences  attain  to  their 
full  evolution,  as  the  organs  of  one  vital  and  harmonious  body, 
nor  that  most  weighty  and  concerning  of  all  sciences,  the  science 
of  education,  be  understood  in  its  first  elements,  much  less  dis 
play  its  powers,  as  the  nisus  formativus$  of  social  man,  as  the 

*  Nov.  Org.  P.  II.  Summ.  M.—Ed. 

\  Eccl  Pol  B.  I.  2.— Ed. 

\  So  our  medical  writers  commonly  translate  Professor  Blumenbach's 
Bildunystrieb,  the  vis  plastica,  or  vis  vitce  formatrix,  of  the  elder  physiolo 
gists,  and  the  life  or  living  principle  of  John  Hunter,  the  profoundest,  I 
had  almost  said  the  only,  physiological  philosopher  of  the  latter  half  of 
the  preceding  century.  For  in  what  other  sense  can  we  understand  his  as 
sertion,  that  this  principle  or  agent  is  independent  of  organization,  which 
yet  it  animates,  sustains,  and  repairs,  or  the  purport  of  that  magnificent 
commentary  on  his  system,  the  Hunterian  Museum  ?  The  Hunterian  idea 


ESSAY    IX.  447 

appointed  protoplast  of  true  humanity.  Never  can  society  com 
prehend  fully,  and  in  its  whole  practical  extent,  the  permanent 
distinction,  and  the  occasional  contrast,  between  cultivation  and 
civilization  ;  never  can  it  attain  to  a  due  insight  into  the  mo 
mentous  fact,  fearfully  as  it  has  been,  and  even  now  is,  exem 
plified  in  a  neighbor  country,  that  a  nation  can  never  be  a  too 
cultivated,  but  may  easily  become  an  over-civilized  race  :  never, 
I  repeat,  can  this  sanative  and  preventive  knowledge  take  up  its 

of  a  life  or  vital  principle  independent  of  the  organization,  yet  in  each  or 
gan  working  instinctively  towards  its  preservation,  as  the  ants  or  termites 
in  repairing  the  nests  of  their  own  fabrication,  demonstrates  that  John  Hun 
ter  did  not,  as  Stahl  and  others  had  done,  individualize,  or  make  an  hypos- 
tasis  of  the  principles  of  life,  as  a  something  manifestable  per  se,  and  conse 
quently  itself  a  phenomenon  ;  the  latency  of  which  was  to  be  attributed  to 
accidental,  or  at  least  contingent  causes,  as  for  example,  the  limits  or  imper 
fection  of  our  senses,  or  the  inaptness  of  the  media ;  but  that  herein  he 
philosophized  in  the  spirit  of  the  purest  Newtonians,  who  in  like  manner 
refused  to  hypostasize  the  law  of  gravitation  into  an  ether,  which  even  if 
its  existence  were  conceded,  would  need  another  gravitation  for  itself. 
The  Hunteriau  position  is  a  genuine  pliilosophic  idea,  the  negative  test  of 
which,  as  of  all  ideas  is,  that  it  is  equi-distaut  from  an  ens  logicum  or  ab 
straction,  an  ens  reprtescntativum  or  generalization,  and  an  ens phantasticum 
or  imaginary  thing  or  pliccnomenon.* 

Is  not  the  progressive  enlargement,  the  boldness  without  temerity,  of 
chirurgical  views  and  chirurgical  practice  since  Hunter's  time  to  the  pres 
ent  day,  attributable,  in  almost  every  instance,  to  his  substitution  of  what 
may  perhaps  be  called  experimental  dynamics,  for  the  mechanical  notions, 
or  the  less  injurious  traditional  empiricism,  of  his  predecessors  ?  And 
this,  too,  though  the  light  is  still  struggling  through  a  cloud,  and  though  it 
is  shed  on  many  who  see  either  dimly  or  not  at  all  the  idea  from  which  it 
is  eradiated  ?  Willingly  would  I  designate,  what  I  have  elsewhere  called 
the  mental  initiative,  by  some  term  less  obnoxious  to  the  anti-Platonic 
reader,  than  this  of  idea — obnoxious,  I  mean,  as  soon  as  any  precise  and  pe 
culiar  sense  is  attached  to  the  sound.  Willingly  would  I  exchange  the  term, 
might  it  be  done  without  sacrifice  of  the  import :  and  did  I  not  see,  too, 
clearly,  that  it  is  the  meaning,  not  the  word,  which  is  the  object  of  that 
aversion,  which,  fleeing  from  inward  alarm,  tries  to  shelter  itself  in  outward 
contempt ;  which  is  at  once  folly  and  a  stumbling-block  to  the  partisans  of 
a  crass  and  sensual  materialism,  the  advocates  of  the  nihil  nisi  ab  extra : — 

They  shrink  in,  as  moles, 

Nature's  mute  monks,  live  mandrakes  of  the  ground, 
Creep  back  from  light,  then  listen  for  its  sound ; 
See  but  to  dread,  and  dread  they  know  not  why, 
The  natural  alien  of  their  negative  eye  ! 

Poet.  Works,  VII.  p.  190. 
*  Theory  of  Life,  I.  App.  C. — Am.  Ed. 


448  THE    FRIEND. 

abode  among  us,  while  we  oppose  ourselves  voluntarily  to  that 
grand  prcrog»ative  of  our  nature,  a  hungering  and  thirsting  after 
truth,  as  the  appropriate  end  of  our  intelligential,  and  its  point 
of  union  with  our  moral  nature  ;  but  therefore  after  truth,  that 
must  be  found  within  us  before  it  can  be  intelligibly  reflected 
back  on  the  mind  from  without,  and  a  religious  regard  to  which 
is  indispensable,  both  as  guide  and  object  to  the  just  formation  of 
the  human  being,  poor  and  rich  :  while,  in  a  word,  we  are  blind 
to  the  master-light,  which  I  have  already  presented  in  various 
points  of  view,  and  recommended  by  whatever  is  of  highest  au 
thority  with  the  venerators  of  the  ancient,  and  the  adherents  of 
modern  philosophy. 


ESSAY    X. 

voov  ov  diduaitei. — TS,lvat  -yap  ev  TO  aofybv,  im 
tyre  £yKvj3epvfjo£i  Truvra  dia.  TTUVTUV.  HERACLITUS.* 

The  effective  education  of  the  reason  is  not  to  be  supplied  by  multifa 
rious  acquirements  :  for  there  is  but  one  knowledge  that  merits  to  be  called 
wisdom,  a  knowledge  that  is  one  with  a  law  which  shall  govern  all  in  and 
through  all. 

HISTORICAL   AND   ILLUSTKATIVE. 

THERE  is  still  preserved  in  the  'Royal  Observatory  at  Richmond 
the  model  of  a  bridge,  constructed  by  the  late  justly  celebrated 
Mr.  Atwood  (at  that  time,  however,  in  the  decline  of  life),  in  the 
confidence  that  he  had  explained  the  wonderful  properties  of  the 
arch  as  resulting  from  the  compound  action  of  simple  wedges,  or 
of  the  rectilinear  solids  of  which  the  material  arch  was  com 
posed  ;  and  of  which  supposed-  discovery,  his  model  was  to  ex 
hibit  ocular  proof.  Accordingly,  he  took  a  sufficient  number  of 
wedges  of  brass  highly  polished.  Arranging  these  at  first  on  a 
skeleton  arch  of  wood,  he  then  removed  this  scaffolding  or  sup 
port  ;  and  the  bridge  not  only  stood  firm,  without  any  cement 
between  the  squares,  but  he  could  take  away  any  given  portion 
of  them,  as  a  third  or  a  half,  and  appending  a  correspondent 
*  Diogen.  Laert.  ix.  c.  1,  s.  2. — Ed. 


ESSAy    X.  449 

weight,  at  either  side,  the  remaining  part  stood  as  before.  Our 
venerable  sovereign,  who  is  known  to  have  had  a  particular  in 
terest  and  pleasure  in  all  works  and  discoveries  of  mechanic 
science  or  ingenuity,  looked  at  it  for  awhile  steadfastly,  and,  as 
his  manner  was,  with  quick  and  broken  expressions  of  praise 
and  courteous  approbation,  in  the  form  of  answers  to  his  own 
questions.  At  length,  turning  to  the  constructor,  he  said,  "  But, 
Mr.  Atwood,  you  have  presumed  the  figure.  You  have  put  the 
arch  first  in  this  wooden  skeleton.  Can  you  build  a  bridge  of 
the  same  wedges  in  any  other  figure  ?  A  strait  bridge,  or  with 
two  lines  touching  at  the  apex  ?  If  not,  is  it  not  evident,  that 
the  bits  of  brass  derive  their  continuance  in  the  present  position 
from  the  property  of  the  arch,  and  not  the  arch  from  the  property 
of  the  wedge  ?  The  objection  was  fatal,  the  justice  of  the  re 
mark  not  to  be  resisted  ;  and  I  have  ever  deemed  it  a  forcible 
illustration  of  the  Aristotelian  axiom,  with  respect  to  all  just 
reasoning,  that  the  whole  is  of  necessity  prior  to  its  parts  ;  nor 
can  I  conceive  a  more  apt  illustration  of  the  scientific  principles 
I  have  already  laid  down. 

All  method  supposes  a  union  of  several  things  to  a  common 
end,  either  by  disposition,  as  in  the  works  of  man  ;  or  by  conver 
gence,  as  in  the  operations  and  products  of  nature.  That  we  ac 
knowledge  a  method,  even  in  the  latter,  results  from  the  religious 
instinct  which  bids  us  "  find  tongues  in  trees  ;  books  in  the  run 
ning  streams  ;  sermons  in  stones  ;  and  good  (that  is,  some  useful 
end  answering  to  some  good  purpose)  in  every  thing."  In  a  self- 
conscious  and  thence  reflecting  being,  no  instinct  can  exist  with 
out  engendering  the  belief  of  an  object  corresponding  to  it,  either 
present  or  future,  real  or  capable  of  being  realized  ;  much  less  the 
instinct,  in  which  humanity  itself  is  grounded  ; — that  by  which, 
in  every  act  of  conscious  perception,  we  at  once  identify  our  being 
with  that  of  the  world  without  us,  and  yet  place  ourselves  in 
contra-distinction  to  that  world.  Least  of  all  can  this  mysterious 
pre-disposition  exist  without  evolving  a  belief  that  the  productive 
power,*  which  in  nature  acts  as  nature,  is  essentially  one  (that 

*  Obscure  from  too  great  compression.  The  sense  is,  that  the  productive 
power,  or  vis  naturans,  which  in  the  sensible  world,  or  natura  naturata,  is 
what  we  mean  by  tlie  word,  nature,  when  we  speak  of  the  same  as  an  agent, 
is  essentially  one,  <tc.  In  other  words,  idea  and  law  are  the  subjective  and 
objective  poles  of  the  same  magnet,  that  is,  of  the  same  living  and  euergiz- 


450  THE    FRIEND. 

is,  of  one  kind)  with  the  intelligence,  which  is  in  the  human  mind 
above  nature  ;  however  disfigured  this  belief  may  become  by  ac 
cidental  forms  or  accompaniments,  and  though  like  heat  in  the 
thawing  of  ice,  it  may  appear  only  in  its  effects.  So  universally 
has  this  conviction  leavened  the  very  substance  of  all  discourse, 
that  there  is  no  language  on  earth  in  which  a  man  can  abjure  it 
as  a  prejudice,  without  employing  terms  and  conjunctions  that 
suppose  its  reality,  with  a  feeling  very  different  from  that  which 
accompanies  a  figurative  or  metaphorical  use  of  words.  In  all 
aggregates  of  construction  therefore,  which  we  contemplate  as 
wholes,  whether  as  integral  parts  or  as  a  system,  we  assume  an 
intention,  as  the  initiative,  of  which  the  end  is  the  correlative. 

Hence  proceeds  the  introduction  of  final  causes  in  the  works 
of  nature  equally  as  in  those  of  man.  Hence  their  assumption, 
as  constitutive  and  explanatory,  by  the  mass  of  mankind  ;  and 
the  employment  of  the  presumption,  as  an  auxiliary  and  regula 
tive  principle,  by  the  enlightened  naturalist,  whose  office  it  is  to 
seek,  discover,  and  investigate  the  efficient  causes.  Without  de 
nying,  that  to  resolve  the  efficient  into  the  final  may  be  the  ulti 
mate  aim  of  philosophy,  he,  of  good  right,  resists  the  substitution 
of  the  latter  for  the  former,  as  premature,  presumptuous,  and 
preclusive  of  all  science  ;  well  aware,  that  those  sciences  have 
been  most  progressive,  in  which  this  confusion  has  been  either 
precluded  by  the  nature  of  the  science  itself,  as  in  pure  mathe 
matics,  or  avoided  by  the  good  sense  of  its  cultivator.  Yet  even 
he  admits  a  teleological  ground  in  physics  arid  physiology  ;  that 
is,  the  presumption  of  a  something  analogous  to  the  casualty  of 
the  human  will,  by  which,  without  assigning  to  nature,  as  na 
ture,  a  conscious  purpose,  he  may  yet  distinguish  her  agency 
from  a  blind  and  lifeless  mechanism.  Even  he  admits  its  use, 

% 

ing  reason.  What  an  idea  is  in  the  subject,  that  is,  in  the  mind,  is  a  law  in 
the  object,  that  is,  in  nature.  But  throughout  these  essays,  the  want  of  il 
lustrative  examples,  and  varied  exposition  is,  I  am  conscious,  the  main  de 
fect,  and  it  was  occasioned  by  the  haunting  Jread  of  being  tedious.  But  O  ! 
the  cold  water  that  was  thrown  on  me,  chiefly  from  those  from  whom  I 
ought  to  have  received  warmth  and  encouragement !  "  Who,  do  you  ex 
pect,  will  read  this,"  <fec. — But,  vanity  as  it  may  appear,  it  is  nevertheless 
true,  and  uttered  with  feelings  the  most  unlike  those  of  self-conceit,  that  it 
lias  been  my  mistake  through  life  to  be  looking  up  to  those  whom  I  ought 
to  have  been  looking  at,  nay  (in  some  instances)  down  upon. — June  23d, 
1829. 


ESSAY    X.  451 

and,  in  many  instances,  its  necessity,  as  a  regulative  principle  ; 
as  a  ground  of  anticipation,  for  the  guidance  of  his  judgment  and 
for  the  direction  of  his  observation  and  experiment ; — briefly  in 
all  that  preparatory  process,  which  the  French  language  so  hap 
pily  expresses  by  s'orienter,  to  find  out  the  east  for  one's  self. 
When  the  naturalist  contemplates  the  structure  of  a  bird,  for  in 
stance,  the  hollow  cavity  of  the  bones,  the  position  of  the  wings 
for  motion,  and  of  the  tail  for  steering  its  course,  and  the  like,  he 
knows  indeed  that  there  must  be  a  correspondent  mechanism,  as 
the  nexus  efectivus  ;  but  he  knows,  likewise,  that  this  will  110 
more  explain  the  particular  existence  of  the  bird,  than  the  prin 
ciples  of  cohesion  could  inform  him  why  of  two  buildings  one  is  a 
palace  and  the  other  a  church.  Nay,  it  must  not  be  overlooked, 
that  the  assumption  of  the  nexus  cjfectivus  itself  originates  in  the 
mind,  as  one  of  the  laws  under  which  alone  it  can  reduce  the 
manifold  of  the  impression  from  without  into  unity,  and  thus 
contemplate  it  as  one  thing  ;  and  could  never  (as  hath  been 
clearly  proved  by  Mr.  Hume)  have  been  derived  from  outward 
experience,  in  which  it  is  indeed  presupposed  as  a  necessary  con 
dition.  Notio  nexus  causalis  non  oritur,  sed  supponitur,  a  sen- 
sibus.  Between,  the  purpose  and  the  end  the  component  parts  are 
included,  arid  thence  receive  their  position  and  character  as 
means,  that  is,  parts  contemplated  as  parts.  It  is  in  this  sense, 
that  I  will  affirm  that  the  parts,  as  means  to  an  end,  derive  their 
position,  and  therein  their  qualities  (or  character) — nay,  I  dare 
add,  their  very  existence,  as  particular  things, — from  the  ante 
cedent  method,  or  self-organizing  purpose  ;  upon  which  therefore 
I  have  dwelt  so  long. 

I  am  aware  that  it  is  with  our  cognitions  as  with  our  children. 
There  is  a  period  in  which,  the  method  of  nature  is  working  for 
them  ;  a  period  of  aimless  activity  and  unregulated  accumulation, 
during  which  it  is  enough  if  we  can  preserve  them  in  health  and 
out  of  harm's  wray.  Again,  there  is  a  period  of  orderliness,  of 
circumspection,  of  discipline,  in  which  we  purify,  separate,  define, 
select,  arrange,  and  settle  the  nomenclature  of  communication. 
There  is  also  a  period  of  dawning  and  twilight,  a  period  of  antici 
pation,  affording  trials  of  strength.  And  all  these,  both  in  the 
growth  of  the  sciences  arid  in  the  mind  of  a  rightly-educated  in 
dividual,  will  precede  the  attainment  of  a  scientific  method.  But, 
notwithstanding  this,  unless  the  importance  of  the  latter  be  felt 


452  THE    FRIEND. 

and  acknowledged,  unless  its  attainment  be  looked  forward  to  and 
from  the  very  beginning  prepared  for,  there  is  little  hope  and 
small  chance  that  any  education  will  be  conducted  aright ;  or 
will  ever  prove  in  reality  worth  the  name. 

Much  labor,  much  wealth  may  have  been  expended,  yet  the 
final  result  will  too  probably  warrant  the  sarcasm  of  the  Scythian 
traveller  :  V&  !  quantum  nihili  !  and  draw  from  a  wise  man 
the  earnest  recommendation  of  a  full  draught  from  Lethe,  as  the 
first  and  indispensable  preparative  for  the  waters  of  the  true  Heli 
con.  Alas  !  how  many  examples  are  now  present  to  my  mem 
ory,  of  young  men  the  most  anxiously  and  expensively  be-school- 
mastered,  be-tutored,  be-lectured,  any  thing  but  educated  ;  who 
have  received  arms  and  ammunition,  instead  of  skill,  strength, 
and  courage  ;  varnished  rather  than  polished  ;  perilously  over- 
civilized,  and  most  pitiably  uncultivated  !  And  all  from  inatten 
tion  to  the  method  dictated  by  nature  herself,  to  the  simple  truth, 
that  as  the  forms  in  all  organized  existence,  so  must  all  true  and 
living  knowledge  proceed  from  within  ;  that  it  may  be  trained, 
supported,  fed,  excited,  but  can  never  be  infused,  or  impressed. 

Look  back  on  the  history  of  the  sciences.  Review  the  method 
in  which  providence  has  brought  the  more  favored  portion  of 
mankind  to  their  present  state.  Lord  Bacon  has  justly  remarked, 
antiquitas  sceculi  juventus  tnundi* — antiquity  of  time  is  the 
youth  of  the  world  and  of  science.  In  the  childhood  of  the 
human  race,  its  education  commenced  with  the  cultivation  of  the 
moral  sense  ;  the  object  proposed  being  such  as  the  mind  only 
could  apprehend,  and  the  principle  of  obedience  being  placed  in 
the  will.  The  appeal  in  both  was  made  to  the  inward  man. 
Through  faith  we  imderstand  that  the  worlds  ivere  framed  by 
the  word  of  God  ;  so  that  things  which  are  seen  were  not  made 
of  things  which  do  appear.  The  solution  of  phenomena  can 
never  be  derived  from  phenomena.  Upon  this  ground  the 
writer  of  the  epistle  to  the  Hebrews  (c.  xi.)  is  not  less  philosoph 
ical  than  eloquent.  The  aim,  the  method  throughout  was,  in  the 
first  place,  to  awaken,  to  cultivate,  and  to  mature  the  truly 
human  in  human  nature,  in  arid  through  itself,  or  as  independ 
ently  as  possible  of  the  notices  derived  from  sense,  and  of  the 
motives  that  had  reference  to  the  sensations  ;  till  the  time  should 
arrive  when  the  senses  themselves  might  be  allowed  to  present 
*  Advancement  of  Learning,  B.  i. — Ed. 


ESSAY    X.  453 

symbols  and  attestations  of  truths,  learnt  previously  from  deeper 
and  inner  sources.  Thus  the  first  period  of  the  education  of  our 
race  was  evidently  assigned  to  the  cultivation  of  humanity  itself, 
or  of  that  in  man,  which  of  all  known  embodied  creatures  he 
alone  possesses,  the  pure  reason,  as  designed  to  regulate  the  will. 
And  by  what  method  was  this  done  ?  First,  by  the  excitement 
of  the  idea  of  their  Creator  as  a  spirit,  of  an  idea  which  they  were 
strictly  forbidden  to  realize  to  themselves  under  any  image  ;  and 
secondly,  by  the  injunction  of  obedience  to  the  will  of  a  super- 
sensual  Being.  Nor  did  the  method  stop  here.  For,  unless  we 
are  equally  to  contradict  Moses  and  the  New  Testament,  in  com 
pliment  to  the  paradox  of  a  Warburton,  the  rewards  of  their  obe 
dience  were  placed  at  a  distance.  For  the  time  present  they 
equally  with  us  were  to  endure,  as  seeing  him  who  is  invisible. 
Their  bodies  they  were  taught  to  consider  as  fleshly  tents,  which 
as  pilgrims  they  were  bound  to  pitch  wherever  the  invisible  Di 
rector  of  their  route  should  appoint,  however  barren  or  thorny  the 
spot  might  appear.  Few  and  evil  have  the  days  of  the  years 
of  my  life  been*  says  the  aged  Israel.  But  that  life  was  but 
his  pilgrimage,  and  he  trusted  in  the  promises. 

Thus  were  the  very  first  lessons  in  the  divine  school  assigned 
to  the  cultivation  of  the  reason  and  of  the  will ;  or  rather  of  both 
as  united  in  faith.  The  common  and  ultimate  object  of  the  will 
and  of  the  reason  was  purely  spiritual,  and  to  be  present  in  the 
mind  of  the  disciple — ftovov  lv  idea,  jLtr^ccfii]  etdwhx&g,  that  is,  in 
the  idea  alone,  and  never  as  an  image  or  imagination.  The 
means  too,  by  which  the  idea  was  to  be  excited,  as  well  as  the 
symbols  by  which  it  was  to  be  communicated,  were  to  be,  as  far 
as  possible,  intellectual. 

Those,  on  the  contrary,  who  wilfully  chose  a  mode  opposite  to 
this  method,  who  determined  to  shape  their  convictions  and  de 
duce  their  knowledge  from  without,  by  exclusive  observation  of 
outward  and  sensible  things  as  the  only  realities,  became,  it  ap 
pears,  rapidly  civilized.  They  built  cities,  invented  musical  in 
struments,  were  artificers  in  brass  and  in  iron,  and  refined  on  the 
means  of  sensual  gratification,  and  the  conveniencies  of  courtly  in 
tercourse.  They  became  the  great  masters  of  the  agreeable,  which 
fraternized  readily  with  cruelty  and  rapacity  ;  these  being, 
indeed,  but  alternate  moods  of  the  same  sensual  selfishness. 
*  Gen.  xlvii.  9. 


454  THE    FRIEND. 

Thus,  both  before  and  after  the  flood,  the  vicious  of  mankind  re 
ceded  from  all  true  cultivation,  as  they  hurried  towards  civiliza 
tion.  Finally,  as  it  was  not  in  their  power  to  make  themselves 
wholly  beasts,  or  to  remain  without  a  semblance  of  religion  ;  and 
yet  continuing  faithful  to  their  original  maxim,  and  determined  to 
receive  nothing  as  true,  but  what  they  derived,  or  believed  them 
selves  to  derive  from  their  senses,  or  (in  modern  phrase)  what 
they  could  prove  a  posteriori,  they  became  idolaters  of  the  heav 
ens  and  the  material  elements.  From  the  harmony  of  operation 
they  concluded  a  certain  unity  of  nature  and  design,  but  were  in 
capable  of  finding  in  the  facts  any  proof  of  a  unity  of  person. 
They  did  not,  in  this  respect,  pretend  to  find  what  they  must 
themselves  have  first  assumed.  Having  thrown  away  the  clus 
ters,  which  had  grown  in  the  vineyard  of  revelation,  they  could 
not,  as  later  reasoncrs,  by  being  born  in  a  Christian  country,  have 
been  enabled  to  do,  hang  the  grapes  on  thorns,  and  then  pluck 
them  as  the  native  growth  of  the  bushes.  But  the  men  of  sense 
of  the  patriarchal  times,  neglecting  reason  and  having  rejected 
faith,  adopted  what  the  facts  seemed  to  involve  and  the  most  ob 
vious  analogies  to  suggest.  They  acknowledged  a  whole  bee 
hive  of  natural  gods  :  but  while  they  were  employed  in  building 
a  temple^'  consecrated  to  the  material  heavens,  it  pleased  divine 
wisdom  to  send  on  them  a  confusion  of  lip  accompanied  with  the 
usual  embitterment  of  controversy,  where  all  parties  are  in  the 
wrong,  and  the  grounds  of  quarrel  are  equally  plausible  on  all 
sides.  As  the  modes  of  error  are  endless,  the  hundred  forms  of 
polytheism  had  each  its  group  of  partisans  who,  hostile  or  alien 
ated,  thenceforward  formed  separate  tribes  kept  aloof  from  each 

*  I  am  far  from  being  a  Hutchinsonian,  nor  have  I  found  much  to  respect 
in  the  twelve  volumes  of  Hutchinson's  works,  either  as  biblical  comment  or 
natural  philosophy ;  though  I  give  him  credit  for  orthodoxy  and  good  in 
tentions.  But  his  interpretation  of  the  first  nine  verses  of  Genesis  xi.  seems 
not  only  rational  in  itself,  and  consistent  with  after  accounts  of  the  sacred 
historian,  but  proved  to  be  the  literal  sense  of  the  Hebrew  text.  His  ex 
planation  of  the  cherubim  is  pleasing  and  plausible  :  I  dare  not  say  more. 
Those  who  would  wish  to  learn  the  most  important  points  of  the  Hutchin- 
souian  doctrine  in  the  most  favorable  form,  and  in  the  shortest  possible 
space,  I  can  refer  to  Duncan  Forbes's  Letter  to  a  Bishop.  If  my  own  judg 
ment  did  not  withhold  my  assent,  I  should  never  be  ashamed  of  a  conviction 
holden,  professed,  and  advocated  by  so  good  and  wise  a  man  as  Duncan 
Forbes. 


ESSAY    X,  455 

other  by  their  ambitious  leaders.  Hence  arose,  in  the  course  of 
a  few  centuries,  the  diversity  of  languages,  which  has  sometimes 
been  confounded  Avith  the  miraculous  event  that  was  indeed  its 
first  and  principal,  though  remote,  cause. 

Following  next,  and  as  the  representative  of  the  youth  and 
approaching  manhood  of  the  human  intellect,  we  have  ancient 
Greece,  from*  Orpheus,  Linus,  Musseus,  and  the  other  mythologi 
cal  bards,  or  perhaps  the  brotherhoods  impersonated  under  those 
names,*  to  the  time  when  the  republics  lost  their  independence, 
and  their  learned  men  sank  into  copyists  and  commentators  of 
the  works  of  their  forefathers.  That  I  include  these  as  educated 
under  a  distinct  providential,  though  not  miraculous,  dispensa 
tion,  will  surprise  no  one,  who  reflects  that  in  whatever  has  a 
permanent  operation  on  the  destinies  and  intellectual  condition 
of  mankind  at  large — that  in  all  which  has  been  manifestly  em 
ployed  as  a  co-agent  in  the  mightiest  revolution  of  the  moral 
world,  the  propagation  of  the  gospel  ;  and  in  the  intellectual 
progress  of  mankind,  in  the  restoration  of  philosophy,  science,  and 
the  ingenuous  arts — it  were  irreligion  not  to  acknowledge  the 
hand  of  Divine  providence.  The  periods,  too,  join  on  to  each 
other.  The  earliest  Greeks  took  up  the  religious  and  lyrical 
poetry  of  the  Hebrews ;  and  the  schools  of  the  prophets  were, 
however  partially  and  imperfectly,  represented  by  the  mysteries, 
derived  through  the  corrupt  channel  of  the  Phoenicians.  With 
these  secret  schools  of  physiological  theology  'the  mythical  poets 
were  doubtless  in  connection  ;  and  it  was  these  schools,  which 
prevented  polytheism  from  producing  all  its  natural  barbarizing 
effects.  The  mysteries  and  the  mythical  hymns  and  pseans 
shaped  themselves  gradually  into  epic  poetry  and  history  on  the 
one  hand,  and  into  the  ethical  tragedy  and  philosophy  on  the 
other.  Under  their  protection,  and  that  of  a  youthful  liberty 
secretly  controlled  by  a  species  of  internal  theocracy,  the  sciences 

*  "  I  have  no  doubt  whatever  that  Homer  is  a  mere  concrete  name  for' 
the  rhapsodies  of  the  Iliad.  Of  course  there  was  a  Homer,  and  twenty  be 
sides.  '  *  *  I  have  the  firmest  conviction  that  Homer  is  a  mere 
traditional  synonyme  with,  or  figure  for,  the  Iliad.  You  can  not  conceive 
for  a  moment,  any  thing  about  the  poet,  as  you  call  him,  apart  from  that 
poem.  Difference  in  men  there  was  in  degree,  but  not  in  kind ;  one  man 
was,  perhaps,  a  better  poet  than  another  ;  but  he  was  a  poet  upon  the 
same  ground  and  with  the  same  feelings  as  the  rest."  Table  Talk,  VI.  pp. 
312,  400.— Ed. 


456  THE    FRIEND. 

and  the  sterner  kinds  of  the  fine  arts,  namely,  architecture  and 
statuary,  grew  up  together ; — followed,  indeed,  by  painting,  but 
a  statuesque  and  austerely  idealized  painting,  which  did  not  de 
generate  into  mere  copies  of  the  sense,  till  the  process,  for  which 
Greece  existed,  had  been  completed.  Contrast  the  rapid  pro 
gress  and  perfection  of  all  the  products,  which  owe  their  exist 
ence  and  character  to  the  mind's  own  acts,  intellectual  or  imagi 
native,  with  the  rudeness  of  their  application  to  the  investigation 
of  physical  laws  and  phenomena  :  then  contemplate  the  Greeks 
(r^aiot  (ist  naldsgj  as  representing  a  portion  only  of  the  education 
of  man  ;  and  the  conclusion  is  inevitable. 

In  the  education  of  the  mind  of  the  race,  as  in  that  of  the  in 
dividual,  each  different  age  and  purpose  requires  different  objects 
and  different  means  ;  though  all  dictated  by  the  same  principle, 
tending  toward  the  same  end,  and  forming  consecutive  parts  of 
the  same  method.  But  if  the  scale  taken  be  sufficiently  large  to 
neutralize  or  render  insignificant  the  disturbing  forces  of  accident, 
the  degree  of  success  is  the  best  criterion  by  which  to  appreciate 
both  the  wisdom  of  the  general  principle,  and  the  fitness  of  the 
particular  objects  to  the  given  epoch  or  period.  Now  it  is  a  fact, 
for  the  greater  part  of  universal  acceptance,  and  attested  as  to 
the  remainder  by  all  that  is  of  highest  fame  and  authority,  by 
the  great,  wise,  and  good,  during  a  space  of  at  least  seventeen 
centuries — weighed  against  whom  the  opinions  of  a  few  distin 
guished  individuals,  or  the  fashion  of  a  single  age,  must  be  holden 
light  in  the  balance, — it  is  a  fact,  I  say,  that  whatever  could  be 
educed  by  the  mind  out  of  its  own  essence,  by  attention  to  its 
own  acts  and  laws  of  action,  or  as  the  products  of  the  same  ;  and 
whatever  likewise  could  be  reflected  from  material  masses  trans 
formed  as  it  were  into  mirrors,  the  excellence  of  which  is  to  re 
veal,  in  the  least  possible  degree,  their  own  original  forms  and 
natures  ; — all  these,  whether  arts  or  sciences,  the  ancient  Greeks 
carried  to  an  almost  ideal  perfection  :  while  in  the  application 
of  their  skill  and  science  to  the  investigation  of  the  laws  of  the 
sensible  world,  and  the  qualities  and  composition  of  material  con 
cretes,  chemical,  mechanical,  or  organic,  their  essays  were  crude 
and  improsperous,  compared  with  those  of  the  moderns  during 
the  early  morning  of  their  strength,  and  even  at  the  first  re-as 
cension  of  the  light.  But  still  more  striking  will  the  difference 
appear,  if  we  contrast  the  physiological  schemes  and  fancies  of 


ESSAY    X.  457 

the  Greeks  with  their  own  discoveries  in  the  region  of  the  pure 
intellect,  and  with  their  still  unrivalled  success  in  the  arts  of 
imagination.  In  the  aversion  of  their  great  men  from  any  prac 
tical  use  of  their  philosophic  discoveries,  as  in  the  well-known 
instance  of  Archimedes,  the  soul  of  the  world  was  at  work ;  and 
the  few  exceptions  w^ere  but  a  rush  of  billows  driven  shoreward 
by  some  chance  gust  before  the  hour  of  tide,  instantly  retracted, 
and  leaving  the  sands  bare  and  soundless  long  after  the  momen 
tary  glitter  had  been  lost  in  evaporation. 

The  third  period,  that  of  the  Romans,  was  devoted  to  the 
preparations  for  preserving,  propagating,  and  realizing  the  labors 
of  the  preceding ;  to  war,  empire,  law.  To  this  we  may  refer 
the  defect  of  all  originality  in  the  Latin  poets  arid  philosophers,  on 
the  one  hand,  and  on  the  other,  the  predilection  of  the  Romans 
for  astrology,  magic,  divination  in  all  its  forms.  It  was  the  Ro 
man  instinct  to  appropriate  by  conquest  and  to  give  fixure  by 
legislation.  And  it  was  the  bewilderment  arid  prematurity  of 
the  same  instinct  which  restlessly  impelled  them  to  materialize 
the  ideas  of  the  Greek  philosophers,  and  to  render  them  practical 
by  superstitious  uses. 

Thus  the  Hebrews  may  be  regarded  as  the  fixed  mid  point  of 
the  living  line,  toward  which  the  Greeks  as  the  ideal  pole,  and 
the  Romans  as  the  material,  were  eVer  approximating  ;  till  the 
coincidence  and  final  synthesis  took  place  in  Christianity,  of 
which  the  Bible  is  the  law,  and  Christendom  the  phenomenon. 
So  little  confirmation  from  history,  from  the  process  of  education 
planned  and  conducted  by  unerring  Providence,  do  those  theorists 
receive,  who  would  at  least  begin  (too  many,  alas  !  both  begin 
and  end)  with  the  objects  of  the  senses  ;  as  if  nature  herself  had 
not  abundantly  performed  this  part  of  the  task,  by  continuous, 
irresistible  enforcements  of  attention  to  her  presence,  to  the  direct 
beholding,  to  the  apprehension  and  observation,  of  the  objects 
that  stimulate  the  senses  ; — as  if  the  cultivation  of  the  mental 
powers,  by  methodical  exercise  of  their  own  forces,  were  not  the 
securest  means  of  forming  the  true  correspondents  to  them  in 
the  functions  of  comparison,  judgment,  and  interpretation. 

VOL.  II.  U 


ESSAY  XL 

Sapiinus  animo,  fmimur  anima :  sine  animo  animo  cst  debilis. 

L.  Accii  Fragments 

As  there  are  two  wants  connatural  to  man,  so  are  there  two 
main  directions  of  human  activity,  pervading  in  modern  times 
the  whole  civilized  world ;  and  constituting  and  sustaining  that 
nationality  which  yet  it  is  their  tendency,  and,  more  or  less, 
their  effect,  to  transcend  and  to  moderate, — trade  and  literature. 
These  were  they,  which,  after  the  dismemberment  of  the  old 
Roman  world,  gradually  reduced  the  conquerors  and  the  con 
quered  at  once  into  several  nations  and  a  common  Christendom. 
The  natural  law  of  increase  and  the  instincts  of  family  may  pro 
duce  tribes,  and,  under  rare  and  peculiar  circumstances,  settle 
ments  and  neighborhoods ;  and  conquest  may  form  empires. 
But  without  trade  and  literature,  mutually  commingled,  there 
can  be*no  nation;  without  commerce  and  science,  no  bond  of 
nations.  As  the  one  hath  for  its  object  the  wants  of  the  body, 
real  or  artificial,  the  desires  for  which  are  for  the  greater  part, 
nay,  as  far  as  the  origination  of  trade  and  commerce  is  concerned, 
altogether  excited  from  without ;  so  the  other  has  for  its  origin, 
as  well  as  for  its  object,  the  wants  of  the  mind,  the  gratification 
of  which  is  a  natural  and  necessary  condition  of  its  growth  and 
sanity.  And  the  man  (or  the  nation,  considered  according  to  its 
predominant  character  as  one  man)  may  be  regarded  under  these 
circumstances,  as  acting  in  two  forms  of  method,  inseparably  co 
existent,  yet  producing  very  different  effects  accordingly  as  one 
or  the  other  obtains  the  primacy ;  the  senses,  the  memory,  and 
the  understanding  (that  is,  the  retentive,  reflective,  and  judicial 
functions  of  his  mind)  being  common  to  both  methods.  As  is 
the  rank  assigned  to  each  in  the  theory  and  practice  of  the  gov 
erning  classes,  and,  according  to  its  prevalence  in  forming  the 
foundation  of  their  public  habits  and  opinions,  so  will  be  the 


ESSAY    XI.  459 

outward  and  inward  life  of  the  people  at  large  :  such  will  the 
nation  be.  In  tracing  the  epochs,  and  alternations  of  their  rela 
tive  sovereignty  or  subjection,  consists  the  philosophy  of  history. 
In  the  power  of  distinguishing  and  appreciating  their  several 
results  consists  the  historic  sense.  And  that  under  the  ascend 
ency  of  the  mental  and  moral  character  the  commercial  relations 
may  thrive  to  the  utmost  desirable  point,  while  the  reverse  is 
ruinous  to  both,  and  sooner  or  later  effectuates  the  fall  or  debase 
ment  of  the  country  itself — this  is  the  richest  truth  obtained  lor 
mankind  by  historic  research ;  though  unhappily  it  is  the  truth, 
to  which  a  rich  and  commercial  nation  listens  with  most  reluc 
tance  and  receives  with  least  faith.  Where  the  brain  and  the 
immediate  conductors  of  its  influence  remain  healthy  and  vigor 
ous,  the  defects  and  diseases  of  the  eye  will  most  often  admit 
either  of  a  cure  or  a  substitute.  And  so  is  it  with  the  outward 
prosperity  of  a  state,  where  the  well-being  of  the  people  pos 
sesses  the  primacy  in  the  aims  of  the  governing  classes,  and  in 
the  public  feeling.  But  what  avails  the  perfect  state  of  the  eye, 

Though  clear 
To  outward  view  of  blemish  or  of  spot,* 

where  the  optic  nerve  is  paralyzed  by  a  pressure  on  the  brain  ? 
And  even  so  is  it  not  only  with  the  well-being,  but  ultimately 
with  the  prosperity  of  a  people,  where  the  former  is  considered 
(if  it  be  considered  at  all)  as  subordinate  and  secondary  to  wealth 
and  revenue. 

In  the  pursuits  of  commerce  the  man  is  called  into  action 
from  without,  in  order  to  appropriate  the  outward  world,  as  far 
as  he  can  bring  it  within  his  reach,  to  the  purposes  of  his  senses 
and  sensual  nature.  His  ultimate  end  is  appearance  and  enjoy 
ment.  Where  on  the  other  hand  the  nurture  and  evolution  of 
humanity  is  the  final  aim,  there  will  soon  be  seen  a  general 
tendency  toward,  an  earnest  seeking  after,  some  ground  common 
to  the  world  and  to  man,  therein  to  find  the  one  principle  of  per 
manence  and  identity,  the  rock  of  strength  and  refuge,  to  which 
the  soul  may  cling  amid  the  fleeting  surge-like  objects  of  the 
senses.  Disturbed  as  by  the  obscure  quickening  of  an  inward 
birth  ;  made  restless  by  swarming  thoughts,  that,  like  bees  when 
they  first  miss  the  queen  and  mother  of  the  hive,  with  vain  dis- 
*  Miltoii,  Sonnet  to  Cyriack  Skinner. — Ed. 


460  THE    FRIEND. 

cursion  seek  each  in  the  other  what  is  the  common  need  of  all ; 
man  sallies  forth  into  nature — in  nature,  as  in  the  shadows  and 
reflections  of  a  clear  river,  to  discover  the  originals  of  the  forms 
presented  to  him  in  his  own  intellect.  Over  these  shadows,  as 
if  they  were  the  substantial  po\vers  and  presiding  spirits  of  the 
stream,  Narcissus-like,  he  hangs  delighted  :  till  finding  nowhere 
a  representative  of  that  free  agency  which  yet  is  a  fact  of  im 
mediate  consciousness  sanctioned  and  made  fearfully  significant 
by  his  prophetic  conscience,  he  learns  at  last  that  what  he  seeks 
he  has  left  behind,  and  that  he  but  lengthens  the  distance  as  he 
prolongs  the  search.  Under  the  tutorage  of  scientific  analysis, 
haply  first  given  to  him  by  express  revelation, 

E  coclo  descendit,  Tvtidt  ceavrbv,* 

he  separates  the  relations  that  are  wholly  the  creatures  of  his  own 
abstracting  and  comparing  intellect,  and  at  once  discovers  and  re 
coils  from  the  discovery,  that  the  reality,  the  objective  truth,  of 
the  objects  he  has  been  adoring,  derives  its  whole  and  sole  evi 
dence  from  an  obscure  sensation,  which  he  is  alike  unable  to  re 
sist  or  to  comprehend,  which  compels  him  to  contemplate  as 
without  and  independent  of  himself  what  yet  he  could  not  con 
template  at  all,  were  it  not  a  modification  of  his  own  being. 

Earth  fills  her  lap  with  pleasures  of  her  own ; 
Yearnings  she  hath  iu  her  own  natural  kind, 
And,  even  with  something  of  a  mother's  mind, 

And  no  unworthy  aim 
The  homely  nurse  doth  all  she  can 
To  make  her  foster-child,  her  inmate  man, 

Forget  the  glories  he  hath  known, 
And  that  imperial  palace  whence  he  came. 

******* 

O  joy !  that  in  our  embers 

Is  something  that  doth  live, 

That  nature  yet  remembers 

What  was  so  fugitive ! 

The  thought  of  our  past  years  in  me  doth  breed 
Perpetual  benedictions :  not  indeed 
For  that  which  is  most  worthy  to  be  blest ; 
Delight  and  liberty,  the  simple  creed 
Of  childhood,  whether  busy  or  at  rest, 
With  new-fledged  hope  still  fluttering  in  his  breast : — 

*  Juv.  xi.  M.—JEd. 


ESSAY    XI.  4(51 

Not  for  these  I  raise 
The  song  of  thanks  and  praise ; 
But  for  those  obstinate  questionings 
Of  sense  and  outward  things, 
Fallings  from  us,  vanishings  ; 
Blank  misgivings  of  a  creature 
Moving  about  in  -worlds  not  realized, 
High  instincts,  before  which  our  mortal  nature 
Did  tremble  like  a  guilty  thing  surprised ! 
.But  for  those  first  affections, 
Those  shadowy  recollections, 

Which,  be  they  what  they  may, 
Are  yet  the  fountain  light  of  all  our  day, 
Are  yet  a  master  light  of  all  our  seeing ; 

Uphold  us — cherish — and  have  power  to  make 
Our  noisy  years  seem  moments  in  the  being 
Of  the  eternal  silence :  truths  that  wake, 

To  perish  never ; 
Which  neither  listlessness,  nor  mad  endeavor, 

Nor  man  nor  boy, 
Nor  all  that  is  at  enmity  with  joy, 
Can  utterly  abolish  or  destroy ! 

Hence,  in  a  season  of  calm  weather, 

Though  inland  far  we  be, 
Our  souls  have  sight  of  that  immortal  sea 

Which  brought  us  hither  ; 
Can  in  a  moment  travel  thither — 
And  see  the  children  sport  upon  the  shore, 
And  hear  the  mighty  waters  rolling  evermore. 

WORDSWORTH.* 

Long  indeed  will  man  strive  to  satisfy  the  inward  querist  with 
the  phrase,  laws  of  nature.  But  though  the  individual  may  rest 
content  Arith  the  syemly  metaphor,  the  race  can  not.  If  a  law 

*  Intimations  of  immortality  from  recollections  of  early  childhood. — Ed. 
During  my  residence  in  Rome  I  had  the  pleasure  of  reciting  this  sublime 
ode  to  the  illustrious  Baron  Von  Humboldt,  then  the  Prussian  minister  at 
the  papal  court,  and  now  at  the  court  of  St.  James.  By  those  who  knew 
and  honored  both  the  brothers,  the  talents  of  the  ambassador  were  con 
sidered  equal  to  those  of  the  scientific  traveller,  his  judgment  superior.  I 
can  only  say,  that  I  know  few  Englishmen,  whom  I  could  compare  with  him 
in  the  extensive  knowledge  and  just  appreciation  of  English  literature  and 
its  various  epochs.  He  listened  to  the  ode  with  evident  delight,  and  as  evi 
dently  not  without  surprise,  and  at  the  close  of  the  recitation  exclaimed, 
"  And  is  this  the  work  of  a  living  English  poet  ?  I  should  have  attributed 
it  to  the  age  of  Elizabeth,  not  that  I  recollect  any  writer,  whose  style  it 
resembles  ;  but  rather  with  wonder,  that  so  great  and  original  a  poet  should 


462  THE    FRIEND. 

of  nature  be  a  mere  generalization,  it  is  included  in  the  above  as 
an  act  of  the  mind.  But  if  it  be  other  and  more,  and  yet  mani 
festable  only  in  and  to  an  intelligent  spirit,  it  must  in  act  and 
substance  be  itself  spiritual  :  for  things  utterly  heterogeneous  can 
have  no  intercommunion.  In  order  therefore  to  the  recognition 
of  himself  in  nature  man  must  first  learn  to  comprehend  nature 
in  himself,  arid  its  laws  in  the  ground  of  his  own  existence. 
Then  only  can  he  reduce  phenomena  to  principles  ;  then  only 
will  he  have  achieved  the  method,  the  self-unravelling  clue, 
which  alone  can  securely  guide  him  to  the.  conquest  of  the 
former  ; — when  he  has  discovered  in  the  basis  of  their  union  the 
necessity  of  their  differences,  in  the  principle  of  their  continuance 
the  solution  of  their  changes.  It  is  the  idea  alone  of  the  common 
centre,  of  the  universal  law,  by  which  all  power  manifests  itself 
in  opposite  yet  interdependent  forces — (•>?  y&g  dvug  ueJ  nagu  juov&dt, 
X&&IJTCXI,  xal  voBQoiCs  uggunTEi  roualg) — which  enlightening  in 
quiry,  multiplying  experiment,  and  at  once  inspiring  humility  and 
perseverance  will  lead  him  to  comprehend  gradually  and  pro 
gressively  the  relation  of  each  to  the  other,  of  each  to  all,  and  of 
all  to  each. 

Imagine  the  unlettered  African,  or  rude  yet  musing  Indian, 
poring  over  an  illuminated  manuscript  of  the  inspired  volume, 
with  the  vague  yet  deep  impression  that  his  fates  and  fortunes 
are  in  some  unknown  manner  connected  with  its  contents. 
Every  tint,  every  group  of  characters,  has  its  several  dream.  Say 
that  after  long  and  dissatisfying  toils,  he  begins  to  sort,  first  the 
paragraphs  that  appear  to  resemble  each  other,  then  the  lines, 
the  words — nay,  that  he  has  at  length  discovered  that  the  whole 
is  formed  by  the  recurrence  and  interchanges  of  a  limited  number 
of  ciphers,  letters,  marks,  and  points,  which,  however,  in  the 
very  height  and  utmost  perfection  of  his  attainment,  he  makes 
twentyfold  more  numerous  than  they  are,  by  classing  every  differ 
ent  form  of  the  same  character,  intentional  or  accidental,  as  a 
separate  element.  And  the  whole  is  without  soul  or  substance, 
a  talisman  of  superstition,  a  mockery  of  science :  or  employed 

have  escaped  iny  notice."  Often  as  I  repeat  passages  from  it  to  myself,  I 
recur  to  the  words  of  Dante : 

Canzon  !  io  credo,  che  saranno  radi 
Color  die  tua  ragion  intendan  bene : 
Tanto  lor  parli  faticoso  ed  alto. 


ESSAY    XI.  463 

perhaps  at  last  to  feather  the  arrows  of  death,  or  to  shine  and 
flutter  amid  the  plumes  of  savage  vanity.  The  poor  Indian  too 
truly  represents  the  state  of  learned  and  systematic  ignorance — 
arrangement  guided  by  the  light  of  no  leading  idea,  mere  order 
liness  without  method. 

But  see  !  the  friendly  missionary  arrives.  He  explains  to  him 
the  nature  of  written  words,  translates  them  for  him  into  his  na 
tive  sounds,  and  thence  into  the  thoughts  of  his  heart — how  many 
of  these  thoughts  then  first  evolved  into  consciousness,  which  yet 
the  awakening  disciple  receives,  and  not  as  aliens  !•  Hencefor 
ward,  the  book  is  unsealed  for  him  ;  the  depth  is  opened  out ;  he 
communes  with  the  spirit  of  the  volume  as  with  a  living  oracle. 
The  words  become  transparent,  and  he  sees  them  as  though  he 
saw  them  not. 

I  have  thus  delineated  the  two  great  directions  of  man  and  so 
ciety  with  their  several  objects  and  ends.  Concerning  the  con 
ditions  and  principles  of  method  appertaining  to  each,  I  have 
affirmed  (for  the  facts  hitherto  adduced  have  been  rather  for  illus 
tration  than  for  evidence,  to  make  the  position  distinctly  under 
stood  rather  than  to  enforce  the  conviction  of  its  truth)  ;  that  in 
both  there  must  be  a  mental  antecedent ;  but  that  in  the  one  it 
may  be  an  image  or  conception  received  through  the  senses,  and 
originating  from  without,  the  inspiriting  passion  or  desire  being 
alone  the  immediate  and  proper  offspring  of  the  mind ;  while  in 
the  other  the  initiative  thought,  the  intellectual  seed,  must  itself 
have  its  birth-place  within,  whatever  excitement  from  without 
may  be  necessary  for  its  germination.  Will  the  soul  thus 
awakened  neglect  or  undervalue  the  outward  and  conditional 
causes  of  her  growth  ?  Far  rather,  might  I  dare  borrow  a  wild 
fancy  from  the  Mantuan  bard,  or  the  poet  of  Arno,*vill  it  be  with 
her,  as  if  a  stem  or  trunk,  suddenly  endued  with  sense  and  reflec 
tion,  should  contemplate  its  green  shoots,  their  leafits  and  bud 
ding  blossoms,  wondered  at  as  then  first  noticed,  but  welcomed 
nevertheless  as  its  own  growth  :  while  yet  with  undiminished 
gratitude,  and  a  deepened  sense  of  dependency,  it  would  bless  the 
dews  and  the  sunshine  from  without,  deprived  of  the  awakening 
and  fostering  excitement  of  which,  its  own  productivity  would 
have  remained  forever  hidden  from  itself,  or  felt  only  as  the  ob 
scure  trouble  of  a  baffled  instinct. 

Hast  thou  ever  raised  thy  mind  to  the  consideration  of  exist- 


464       ^  THE    FHIEISTD. 

ence,  in  and  by  itself,  as  the  mere  act  of  existing  ?  Hast  thou 
ever  said  to  thyself  thoughtfully,  It  is  !  heedless  in  that  moment, 
whether  it  were  a  man  before  thee,  or  a  flower,  or  a  grain  of 
sand, — without  reference,  in  short,  to  this  or  that  particular  mode 
or  form  of  existence  ?  If  thou  hast  indeed  attained  to  this,  thou 
wilt  have  felt  the  presence  of  a  mystery,  which  must  have  fixed 
thy  spirit  in  awe  and  wonder.  The  very  words, — there  is  noth 
ing  !  or, — There  was  a  time,  when  there  was  nothing  !  are  self- 
contradictory.  There  is  that  within  us  which  repels  the  propo 
sition  with  as  full  and  instantaneous  a  light,  as  if  it  bore  evidence 
against  the  fact  in  the  right  of  its  own  eternity. 

Not  to  be,  then,  is  impossible  :  to  be,  incomprehensible.  If 
thou  hast  mastered  this  intuition  of  absolute  existence,  thou  wilt 
have  learnt  likewise,  that  it  was  this,  and  no  other,  which  in  the 
earlier  ages  seized  the  nobler  minds,  the  elect  among  men,  with 
a  sort  of  sacred  horror.  This  it  was  which  first  caused  them  to 
feel  within  themselves  a  something  ineffably  greater  than  their 
own  individual  nature.  It  was  this  which,  raising  them  aloft, 
and  projecting  them  to  an  ideal  distance  from  themselves,  pre 
pared  them  to  become  the  lights  and  awakening  voices  of  other 
men,  the  founders  of  law  and  religion,  the  educators  and  foster- 
gods  of  mankind.  The  power,  which  evolved  this  idea  of  being, 
being  in  its  essence,  being  limitless,  comprehending  its  own 
limits  in  its  dilatation,  and  condensing  itself  into  its  own  appa 
rent  mounds — how  shall  we  name  it  ?  The  idea  itself,  which 
like  a  mighty  billow  at  once  over\vhelms  and  bears  aloft — what 
is  it  ?  Whence  did  it  come  ?  In  vain  would  we  derive  it  from 
the  organs  of  sense  :  for  these  supply  only  surfaces,  undulations, 
phantoms.  In  vain  from  the  instruments  of  sensation  :  for  these 
furnish  only  the  chaos,  the  shapeless  elements  of  sense.  And 
least  of  all  may  we  hope  to  find  its  origin,  or  sufficient  cause,  in 
the  moulds  and  mechanism  of  the  understanding,  the  whole  pur 
port  and  functions  of  which  consist  in  individualization,  in  out 
lines  and  differencings  by  quantity  and  relation.  It  were  wiser 
to  seek  substance  in  shadow,  than  absolute  fulness  in  mere  ne 
gation. 

I  have  asked  then  for  its  birth-place  in  all  that  constitutes  our  rel 
ative  individuality,  in  all  that  each  man  calls  exclusively  himself. 
It  is  an  alien  of  which  they  know  not  :  and  for  them  the  ques 
tion  itself  is  purposeless,  and  the  very  words  that  convey  it  are  as 


ESSAY    XI.  465 

sounds  in  an  unknown  language,  or  as  the  vision  of  heaven  and 
earth  expanded  by  the  rising  sun,  which  falls  but  as  warmth  on 
the  eyelids  of  the  blind.  To  no  class  of  plic&nomena  or  particu 
lars  can  it  be  referred,  itself  being  none  ;  therefore,  to  no  faculty 
by  which  these  alone  are  apprehended.  As  little  dare  we  refer 
it  to  any  form  of  abstraction  or  generalization  ;  for  it  has  neither 
co-ordinate  nor  analogon  ;  it  is  absolutely  one ;  and  that  it  is, 
and  affirms  itself  to  be,  is  its  only  predicate.  And  yet  this 
power,  nevertheless,  is  ; — in  supremacy  of  being  it  is  ;* — and  he 
for  whom  it  manifests  itself  in  its  adequate  idea,  dare  as  little  ar 
rogate  it  to  himself  as  his  own,  can  as  little  appropriate  it  either 
totally  or  by  partition,  as  he  can  claim  ownership  in  the  breath 
ing  air,  or  make  an  inclosure  in  the  cope  of  heaven. f  He  bears 
witness  of  it  to  his  own  mind,  even  as  he  describes  life  and  light : 
and,  with  the  silence  of  light,  it  describes  itself  and  dwells  in  us 
only  as  far  as  we  dwell  in  it.  The  truths  which  it  manifests  are 
such  as  it  alone  can  manifest,  and  in  all  truth  it  manifests  itself. 
By  what  name  then  canst  thou  call  a  truth  so  manifested  ?  Is 
it  not  revelation  ?  Ask  thyself  whether  thou  canst  attach  to 
that  latter  word  any  consistent  meaning  not  included  in  the 
idea  of  the  former.  And  the  manifesting  power,  the  source  and 
the  correlative  of  the  idea  thus  manifested — is  it  not  God  ? 
Either  thou  knowest  it  to  be  God,  or  thou  hast  called  an  idol  by 
that  awful  name.  Therefore  in  the  most  appropriate,  no  less 
than  in  the  highest,  sense  of  the  word  were  the  earliest  teachers 

*  To  affirm  that  reason  is,  is  the  same  as  to  affirm  that  reason  is  being, 
or  that  the  true  being  is  reason,  'O  Aoyof. — Hence,  the  reason  or  law  of  a 
thing  constitutes  its  actual  being,  the  ground  of  its  reality. — 1829. 

f  And  yet  this  same  is,  is  the  essential  predicate  of  the  correspondent 
object  of  this  power.  What  must  we  infer  ?  Even  this  ; — that  the  object 
and  subject  are  one; — that  the  reason  is  being; — the  supreme  reason  the 
supreme  Being ;  and  that  the  antithesis  of  truth  and  being  is  but  the  result 
of  the  polarizing  property  of  all  finite  mind,  for  which  unity  is  manifested 
only  by  correspondent  opposites.  Here  do  we  stop  ?  Woe  to  us,  if  we  do ! 
Better  that  we  had  never  begun.  A  deeper  yet  must  be  sought  forj — even 
the  absolute  Will,  the  Good,  the  superessential  source  of  being,  and  in  the 
eternal  act  of  self-affirmation,  the  I  Am,  the  Father — who  with  the  only- 
begotten  Logos  (word,  idea,  supreme  mind,  pleroma,  the  word  containing, 
every  word  that  proceedeth  from  the  mouth  of  the  Most  Highest)  and  with 
the  Spirit  proceeding,  is  the  one  only  God  from  everlasting  to  everlasting. 
—1829. 


466  THE    FRIEND. 

of  humanity  inspired.  They  alone  were  the  true  seers  of  God, 
and  therefore  prophets  of  the  human  race. 

Look  round  you,  and  you  behold  everywhere  an  adaptation  of 
means  to  ends.  Meditate  on  the  nature  of  a  being  whose  ideas 
are  creative,  and  consequently  more  real,  more  substantial  than 
the  things  that,  at  the  height  of  their  creaturely  state,  are  but 
their  dim  reflexes  ;*  and  the  intuitive  conviction  will  arise  that 
in  such  a  being  there  could  exist  no  motive  to  the  creation  of  a 
machine  for  its  own  sake  ;  that,  therefore,  the  material  world 
must  have  been  made  for  the  sake  of  man,  at  once  the  high- 
priest  and  representative  of  the  Creator,  as  far  as  he  partakes  of 
that  reason  in  which  the  essences  of  all  things  co-exist  in  all  their 
distinctions  yet  as  one  and  indivisible.  But  I  speak  of  man  in  his 
idea,  and  as  subsumed  in  the  divine  humanity,  in  whom  alone 
G-od  loved  the  world. 

In  all  inferior  things  from  the  grass  on  the  house-top  to  the 
giant  tree  of  the  forest  ;  from  the  gnats  that  swarm  in  its  shade, 
and  the  mole  that  burrows  amid  its  roots  to  the  eagle  which 
builds  in  its  summit,  and  the  elephant  which  browses  on  its 
branches,  we  behold  —  first,  a  subjection  to  universal  laws  by 
which  each  thing  belongs  to  the  whole,  as  interpenetrated  by  the 
powers  of  the  whole  ;  and,  secondly,  the  intervention  of  particu 
lar  laws  by  which  the  universal  laws  are  suspended  or  tempered 
for  the  weal  and  sustenance  of  each  particular  class.  Hence  and 
thus  we  see  too  that  each  species,  and  each  individual  of  every 
species,  becomes  a  system,  a  world  of  its  own.  If  then  we  behold 
this  economy  everywhere  in  the  irrational  creation,  shall  we  not 
hold  it  probable  that  by  some  analogous  intervention  a  similar 
temperament  will  have  been  effected  for  the  rational  arid  moral  ? 

*  If  I  may  not  rather  resemble  them  to  the  resurgent  ashes,  with  which 
(according  to  the  tales  of  the  later  alchemists)  the  substantial  forms  of  bird 
and  flower  made  themselves  visible  as, 
ril  /c 


And.  let  me  be  permitted  to  add,  in  especial  reference  to  this  passage,  a 
premonition  quoted  from  the  same  work  (Zoroastris  Oracula  Magica), 

"A  No£>f  heyei,  rti  VOOVVTI  6r/  rca  Uyet. 

Of  the  flower  apparitions  so  solemnly  affirmed  by  Sir  K.  Digby,  Kercher, 
Helmont,  and  others,  see  a  full  and  most  interesting  account  in  Southey's 
Omniana  (vol.  ii.  p.  82.  Spectral  Flowers.  —  Ed.},  with  a  probable  solution 
of  this  chemical  marvel. 


ESSAY    XI.  467 

Are  we  not  entitled  to  expect  some  appropriate  agency  in  behalf 
of  the  presiding  and  alone*  progressive  creature  ?  To  presume 
some  especial  provision  for  the  permanent  interest  of  the  crea 
ture  destined  to  move  and  grow  towards  that  divine  humanity 
which  we  have  learnt  to  contemplate  as  the  final  cause  of  all 
creation,  and  the  centre  in  which  all  its  lines  converge  ? 

To  discover  the  mode  of  intervention  requisite  for  man's  devel 
opment  and  progression,  we  must  seek  then  for  some  general  law, 
by  the  untempered  and  uncounteracted  action  of  which  man's 
development  and  progression  would  be  prevented  and  endangered. 
But  this  we  shall  find  in  that  law  of  his  understanding  and  fancy, 
by  which  he  is  impelled  to  abstract  the  changes  and  outward  re 
lations  of  matter  and  to  arrange  them  under  the  form  of  causes 
and  effects.  And  this  was  necessary,  as  the  condition  under 
which  alone  experience  and  intellectual  growth  are  possible. 
But,  on  the  other  hand,  by  the  same  law  he  is  inevitably  tempt 
ed  to  misinterpret  a  constant  precedence  into  positive  causation, 
and  thus  to  break  and  scatter  the  one  divine  and  invisible  life  of 
nature  into  countless  idols  of  the  sense  ;  and  falling  prostrate 
before  lifeless  images,  the  creatures  of  his  own  abstraction,  is 
himself  sensualized,  and  becomes  a  slave  to  the  things  of  which 
he  was  formed  to  be  the  conqueror  and  sovereign.  From  the 
fetisch  of  the  imbruted  African  to  the  soul-debasing  errors  of  the 
proud  fact-hunting  materialist  we  may  trace  the  various  ceremo 
nials  of  the  same  idolatry,  and  shall  find  selfishness,  hate,  and 
servitude  as  the  results.  If  therefore  by  the  overruling  and  sus 
pension  of  the  phantom-cause  of  this  superstition  ;  if  by  separat 
ing  effects  from  their  natural  antecedents  ;  if  by  presenting  the 
phenomena  of  time  (as  far  as  is  possible)  in  the  absolute  forms 
of  eternity  ;  the  nursling  of  experience  should,  in  the  early  period 
of  his  pupilage,  be  compelled  by  a  more  impressive  experience  to 
seek  in  the  invisible  life  alone  for  the  true  cause  and  invisible 
nexus  of  the  things  that  are  seen,  we  shall  not  demand  the  evi 
dences  of  ordinary  experience  for  that  which,  if  it  ever  existed, 
existed  as  its  antithesis  and  for  its  counteraction.  Was  it  an  a];-. 
propriate  mean  to  a  necessary  end  ?  Has  it  been  attested  by 
lovers  of  truth  ;  has  it  been  believed  by  lovers  of  wisdom  ?  Do 
we  see  throughout  all  nature  the  occasional  intervention  of  par 
ticular  agencies  in  counter-check  of  universal  laws  ?  (And  of 
what  other  definition  is  a  miracle  susceptible  ?)  These  are  the 


468  THE    FKIEND. 

questions  :  and  if  to  these  our  answers  must  be  affirmative,  then 
we  too  will  acquiesce  in  the  traditions  of  humanity,  and  yielding 
as  to  a  high  interest  of  our  own  being,  will  discipline  ourselves 
to  the  reverential  and  kindly  faith,  that  the  guides  and  teachers 
of  mankind  were  the  hands  of  power,  no  less  than  the  voices  of 
inspiration  :  and  little  anxious  concerning  the  particular  forms, 
proofs,  and  circumstances  of  each  manifestation  we  will  give  an 
historic  credence  to  the  historic  fact,  that  men  sent  by  God  have 
come  with  signs  and  wonders  on  the  earth. 

If  it  be  objected,  that  in  nature,  as  distinguished  from  man, 
this  intervention  of  particular  laws  is,  or  with  the  increase  of 
science  will  be,  resolvable  into  the  universal  laws  which  they 
had  appeared  to  counterbalance,  we  will  reply  :  Even  so  it  may 
be  in  the  case  of  miracles  ;  but  wisdom  forbids  her  children  to 
antedate  their  knowledge,  or  to  act  and  feel  otherwise  or  further 
than  they  know.  But  should  that  time  arrive,  the  sole  differ 
ence,  that  could  result  from  such  an  enlargement  of  our  view, 
would  be  this  ; — that  what  we  now  consider  as  miracle's  in  op 
position  to  ordinary  experience,  we  should  then  reverence  with  a 
yet  higher  devotion  as  harmonious  parts  of  one  great  complex 
miracle",  when  the  antithesis  between  experience  and  belief  would 
itself  be  taken  up  into  unity  of  intuitive  reason. 

And  what  purpose  of  philosophy  can  this  acquiescence  answer  ? 
A  gracious  purpose,  a  most  valuable  end  ;  if  it  prevent  the  ener 
gies  of  philosophy  from  being  idly  wasted,  by  removing  the  con 
trariety  without  confounding  the  distinction  between  philosophy 
and  faith.  The  philosopher  will  remain  a  man  in  sympathy 
with  his  fellow-men.  The  head  will  not  be  disjoined  from  the 
heart,  nor  will  speculative  truth  be  alienated  from  practical  wis 
dom.  And  vainly  without  the  union  of  both  shall  we  expect  an 
opening  of  the  inward  eye  to  the  glorious  vision  of  that  existence 
which  admits  of  no  question  out  of  itself,  acknowledges  no  predi 
cate  but  the  I  AM  IN  THAT  I  AM  !  Oavf.t^oyTsg  <filoao<pov[ABV  cpdo- 
(.TO(fr\aa^TBg  -d^ajLi^ov^sv.  In  wonder  (TU>  ^av/ud^eiv^  says  Aristotle, 
does  philosophy  begin  ;  and  in  astoundment  (TO>  tfapfielv)  says 
Plato,  does  all  true  philosophy  finish.  As  every  faculty,  with  every 
the  minutest  organ  of  our  nature,  owes  its  whole  reality  and  com- 
prehensibility  to  an  existence  incomprehensible  and  groundless, 
because  the  ground  of  all  comprehension  ;  not  without  the  union 
of  all  that  is  essential  in  all  the  functions  of  our  spirit,  not  with- 


ESSAY   XI.  469 

out  an  emotion  tranquil  from  its  very  intensity,  shall  we  worthily 
contemplate  in  the  magnitude  and  integrity  of  the  world  that 
life-ebullient  stream  which  breaks  through  every  momentary 
embankment,  again,  indeed,  and  evermore  to  embank  itself,  but 
within  no  banks  to  stagnate  or  be  imprisoned. 

But  here  it  behooves  us  to  bear  in  mind,  that  all  true  reality 
has  both  its  ground  and  its  evidence  in  the  will,  without  which 
as  its  complement  science  itself  is  but  an  elaborate  game  of  shad 
ows,  begins  in  abstractions  and  ends  in  perplexity^  For  consid 
ered  merely  intellectually,  individuality,  as  individuality,,  is  only 
conceivable  as  with  and  in  the  universal  and  infinite,  neither  be 
fore  nor  after  it.  No  transition  is  possible  from  one  to  the  other, 
as  from  the  architect  to  the  house,  or  the  watch  to  its  maker. 
The  finite  form  can  neither  be  laid  hold  of  by,  nor  can  it  appear 
to,  the  mere  speculative  intellect  as  any  thing  of  itself  real,  but 
merely  as  an  apprehension,  a  frame- work  which  the  human 
imagination  forms  by  its  own  limits,  as  the  foot  measures  itself 
on  the  snow  ;  and  the  sole  truth  of  which  we  must  again  refer  to 
the  divine  imagination,. in  virtue  of  its  omniformity.  For  even 
as  thou  art  capable  of  beholding  the  transparent  air  as  little  dur 
ing  the  absence  as  during  the  presence  of  light,  so  canst  thou  be 
hold  the  finite  things  as  actually  existing  neither  with  nor  with 
out  the  substance.  Not  without, — for  then  the  forms  cease  to 
be,  and  are  lost  in  night :  not  with  it, — for  it  is  the  light,  the 
substance  shining  through  it,  which  thou  canst  alone  real]y  see. 

The  ground-work,  therefore,  of  all  pure  speculation  is  the  full 
apprehension  of  the  difference  between  the  contemplation  of  rea 
son,  namely,  that  intuition  of  things  which  arises  when  we  pos 
sess  ourselves,  as  one  with  the  whole,  which  is  substantial 
knowledge,  and  that  which  presents  itself  when  transferring  re 
ality  to  the  negations  of  reality,  to  the  ever-varying  frame-work 
of  the  uniform  life,  we  think  of  ourselves  as  separated  beings,  and 
place  nature  in  antithesis  to  the  mind,  as  object  to  subject,  thing 
to  thought,  death  to  life.  This  is  abstract  knowledge,  or  the 
science  of  the  mere  understanding.  By  the  former,  we  know 
that  existence  is  its  own  predicate,  self-affirmation,  the  one  attri 
bute  in  which  all  others  areNymtained,  not  as  parts,  but  as  man 
ifestations.  It  is  an  eternal  and  infinite  self-rejoicing,  self-loving, 
with  a  joy  unfathomable,  with  a  love  all-comprehensive.  It  is 
absolute  ;  and  the  absolute  is  neither  singly  that  which  affirms, 


470  THE    FRIEND. 

nor  that  which  is  affirmed  ;  but  the  identity  and  living  copula 
of  both. 

On  the  other  hand,  by  the  abstract  knowledge  which  belongs 
to  us  as  finite  beings,  and  which  leads  to  a  science  of  delusion, 
then  only,  when  it  would  exist  for  itself  instead  of  being  the  in 
strument  of  the  former — (even  as  the  former  is  equally  ho] low 
and  yet  more  perilously  delusive,  where  it  is  not  radicated  in  a 
deeper  ground)  when  it  would  itself,  I  say,  be  its  own  life  and 
verity,  instead  of  being,  as  it  were,  a  translation  of  the  living 
word  into  a  dead  language,  for  the  purposes  of  memory,  arrange 
ment,  and  general  communication, — it  is  by  this  abstract  knowl 
edge  that  the  understanding  distinguishes  the  affirmed  from  the 
affirming.  Well  if  it  distinguish  without  dividing  !  Well  if  by 
distinction  it  add  clearness  to  fulness,  and  prepare  for  the  intel 
lectual  re-union  of  the  all  in  one  in  that  eternal  Reason  whose 
fulness  hath  no  opacity,  whose  transparency  hath  no  vacuum. 

If  we  thoughtfully  review  the  three  preceding  paragraphs,  we 
shall  find  the  conclusion  to  be  ; — that  the  dialectic  intellect  by 
the  exertion  of  its  own  powers  exclusively  can  lead  us  to  a  gen 
eral  affirmation  of  the  supreme  reality  of  an  absolute  being.  But 
here  it  stops.  It  is  utterly  incapable  of  communicating  insight 
or  conviction  concerning  the  existence  or  possibility  of  the  world, 
as  different  from  Deity.  It  finds  itself  constrained  to  identify, 
more  truly  to  confound,  the  Creator  with  the  aggregate  of  his 
creature,  and,  cutting  the  knot  which  it  can  not  untwist,  to  deny 
altogether 'the  reality  of  all  finite  existence,  and  then  to  shelter 
itself  from  its  own  dissatisfaction,  its  own  importunate  queries,  in 
the  wretched  evasion  that  of  nothings,  no  solution  can  be  required  ; 
till  pain  haply,  and  anguish,  and  remorse,  with  bitter  scoff  and 
moody  laughter  inquire  ; — Are  we  then  indeed  nothings  ?— till 
through  every  organ  of  sense  nature  herself  asks  ; — How  and 
whence  did  this  sterile  and  pertinacious  nothing  acquire  its  plural 
number  ? — Unde  quceso,  hcec  nihili  in  nihila  tain  portentosa 
transnihilatio  ? — and  lastly  ; — What  is  that  inward  mirror,  in 
which  these  nothings  have  at  least  relative  existence  ?  The  in 
evitable  result  of  all  consequent  reasoning,  in  which  the  intel 
lect  refuses  to  acknowledge  a  higher  or  deeper  ground  than  it 
can  itself  supply,  and  weens  to  possess  within  itself  the  centre 
of  its  own  system,  is — and  from  Zeno  the  Eleatic  to  Spinosa,  and 
from  Spinosa  to  the  Schellings,  Okens  and  their  adherents,  of  the 


ESSAY    XI.  471 

present  day,  ever  has  been — pantheism  under  one  or  other  of  its 
modes,  the  least  repulsive  of  which  differs  from  the  rest,  not  in 
its  consequences,  which  are  one  and  the  same  in  all,  and  in  all 
alike  are  practically  atheistic,  but  only  as  it  may  express  the 
striving  of  the  philosopher  himself  to  hide  these  consequences 
from  his  own  mind.  This,  therefore,  I  repeat,  is  the  final  con 
clusion.  All  speculative  disquisition  must  begin  with  postulates, 
which  the  conscience  alone  can  at  once  authorize  and  substan 
tiate  :  and  from  whichever  point  the  reason  may  start,  from  the 
things  which  are  seen  to  the  one  invisible,  or  from  the  idea  of  the 
absolute  one  to  the  things  that  are  seen,  it  will  find  a  chasm, 
which  the  moral  being  only,  which  the  spirit  and  religion  of  man 
alone,  can  fill  up. 

Thus  I  prefaced  my  inquiry  into  the  science  of  method  with  a 
principle  deeper  than  science,  more  certain  than  demonstration. 
For  that  the  very  ground,  saith  Aristotle,  is  groundless  or  self- 
grounded,  is  an  identical  proposition.  From  the  indemonstrable 
flows  the  sap  that  circulates  through  every  branch  and  spray  of 
the  demonstration.  To  this  principle  I  referred  the  choice  of  the 
final  object,  the  control  over  time,  or,  to  comprise  all  in  one,  the 
method  of  the  will.  From  this  I  started,  or  rather  seemed  to 
start ;  for  it  still  moved  before  me,  as  an  invisible  guardian  and 
guide,  and  it  is  this  the  re-appearance  of  which  announces  the 
conclusion  of  the  circuit,  and  welcomes  me  at  the  goal.  Yea 
(saith  an  enlightened  physician),  there  is  but  one  principle,  which 
alone  reconciles  the  man  with  himself,  with  others,  and  with  the 
world  ;  which  regulates  all  relations,  tempers  all  passions,  gives 
power  to  overcome  or  support  all  suffering,  and  which  is  not  to 
be  shaken  by  aught  earthly,  for  it  belongs  not  to  the  earth  ; 
namely,  the  principle  of  religion,  the  living  and  substantial  faith 
which  passeth  all  under  standing,  as  the  cloud-piercing  rock, 
which  overhangs  the  stronghold  of  which  it  had  been  the  quarry 
and  remains  the  foundation.  This  elevation  of  the  spirit  above 
the  semblances  of  custom  and  the  senses  to  a  world  of  spirit,  this 
life  in  the  idea,  even  in  the  supreme  and  godlike,  which  alone 
merits  the  name  of  life,  and  without  which  our  organic  life  is  but 
a  state  of  somnambulism  ;  this  it  is  which  affords  the  sole  sure 
anchorage  in  the  storm,  and  at  the  same  time  the  substantiating 
principle  of  all  true  wisdom,  the  satisfactory  solution  of  all  the 
contradictions  of  human  nature,  of  the  whole  riddle  of  the  world. 


472  THE    FKIEND. 

This  alone  belongs  to  and  speaks  intelligibly  to  all  alike,  the 
learned  and  the  ignorant,  if  but  the  heart  listens.  For  alike 
present  in  all,  it  may  be  awakened,  but  it  can  not  be  given.  But 
let  it  riot  be  supposed,  that  it  is  a  sort  of  knowledge  :  no  !  it  is  a 
form  of  BEING,  or  indeed  it  is  the  only  knowledge  that  truly  is, 
and  all  other  science  is  real  only  so  far  as  it  is  symbolical  of  this. 
The  material  universe,  saith  a  Greek  philosopher,  is  but  one  vast 
complex  mythus,  that  is,  symbolical  representation,  and  mythol 
ogy  the  apex  and  complement  of  all  genuine  physiology.  But  as 
this  principle  can  not  be  implanted  by  the  discipline  of  logic,  so 
neither  can  it  be  excited  or  evolved  by  the  arts  of  rhetoric.  For 
it  is  an  immutable  truth,  that  what  comes  from  the  heart,  that 
alone  goes  to  the  heart ;  what  proceeds  from  a  divine  impulse, 
that  the  godlike  alone  can  awaken. 


THE  THIRD  LANDING-PLACE; 


OR 


ESSAYS   MISCELLANEOUS. 


Etiam  a  Musis  si  quando  animum  paulisper  abducamus,  apud  Musas 
nihilo minus  feriamur;  at  reclines  quidem,  at  otiosas,  at  de  his  et  illis  inter 
se  libere  colloqiientes. 


THE  THIRD  LANDING-PLACE. 


ESSAY  I. 

Fortuna  plerutngue  cst  veluti  galaxia  quarundam  obscurarum  virtutum 
sine  nomine.  BACON. 

Fortune  is  for  the  most  part  but  a  galaxy  or  milky-way,  as  it  were,  of 
certain  obscure  virtues  without  a  name. 

DOES  fortune  favor  fools  ?  Or  how  do  you  explain  the  origin 
of  the  proverb,  which,  differently  worded,  is  to  be  found  in  all 
the  languages  of  Europe  ? 

This  proverb  admits  of  various  explanations  according  to  the 
mood  of  mind  in  which  it  is  used.  It  may  arise  from  pity,  and 
the  soothing  persuasion  that  Providence  is  eminently  watchful 
over  the  helpless,  and  extends  an  especial  cafe  to  those  who  are 
not  capable  of  caring  for  themselves.  So  used,  it  breathes  the  same 
feeling  as  'God  tempers  the  wind  to  the  shorn  lamb' — or  the 
more  sportive  adage,  that  '  the  fairies  take  care  of  children  and 
tipsy  folk.'  The  persuasion  itself,  in.  addition  to  the  general  re 
ligious  feeling  of  mankind,  and  the  scarcely  less  general  love  of 
the  marvellous,  may  be  accounted  for  from  our  tendency  to  ex 
aggerate  all  effects  that  seem  disproportionate  to  their  visible 
cause  and  all  circumstances  that  are  in  any  way  strongly  contrast 
ed  with  our  notions  of  the  persons  under  them.  Secondly,  it 
arises  from  the  safety  and  success  which  an  ignorance  of  danger 
arid  difficulty  sometimes  actually  assists  in.  procuring  ;  inasmuch 
as  it  precludes  the  despondence,  which  might  have  kept  the  more 
foresighted  from  undertaking  the  enterprise,  the  depression  which 
would  retard  its  progress,  and  those  overwhelming  influences  of 
terror  in  cases  where  the  vivid  perception  of  the  danger  consti 
tutes  the  greater  part  of  the  danger  itself.  Thus  men  are  said  to 
have  swooned  and  even  died  at  the  sight  of  a  narrow  bridge,  over 


476  THIRD    LANDING-PLACE. 

which  they  had  ridden  the  night  before  in  perfect  safety ;  or  at 
tracing  their  footmarks  along  the  edge  of  a  precipice  which  the 
darkness  had  concealed  from  them.  A  more  obscure  cause,  yet 
not  wholly  to  be  omitted,  is  afforded  by  the  undoubted  fact,  that 
the  exertion  of  the  reasoning  faculties  tends  to  extinguish  or  be 
dim  those  mysterious  instincts  of  skill,  which,  though  for  the  most 
part  latent,  we  nevertheless  possess  in  common  with  other  animals. 

Or  the  proverb  may  be  used  invidiously  :  and  folly  in  the  vo 
cabulary  of  envy  or  baseness  may  signify  courage  and  magnanimi 
ty.  Hardihood  and  fool-hardiness  are  indeed  as  different  as  green 
and  yellow,  yet  will  appear  the  same  to  the  jaundiced  eye. 
Courage  multiplies  the  chances  of  success  by  sometimes  making 
opportunities,  and  always  availing  itself  of  them  ;  and  in  this 
sense  fortune  may  be  said  to  favor  fools  by  those,  who,  however 
prudent  in  their  own  opinion,  are  deficient  in  valor  and  enter 
prise.  Again  :  an  eminently  good  and  wise  man,  for  whom  the 
praises  of  the  judicious  have  procured  a  high  reputation  even 
with  the  world  at  large,  proposes  to  himself  certain  objects,  and 
adapting  the  right  means  to  the  right  end  attains  them  :  but  his 
objects  not  being  what  the  world  calls  fortune,  neither  money  nor 
artificial  rank,  his  admitted  inferiors  in  moral  and  intellectual 
worth,  but  more  prosperous  in  their  worldly  concerns,  are  said  to 
have  been  favored  by  fortune,  and  he  slighted  :  although  the 
fools  did  the  same  in  their  line  as  the  wise  man  in  his  :  they 
adapted  the  appropriate  means  to  the  desired  end  and  so  suc 
ceeded.  In  this  sense  the  proverb  is  current  by  a  misuse,  or  a 
catachresis  at  least,  of  both  the  words,  fortune  and  fools. 

But,  lastly,  there  is,  doubtless,  a  true  meaning  attached  to  for 
tune,  distinct  both  from  prudence  and  from  courage  ;  and  distinct 
too  from  that  absence  of  depressing  or  bewildering  passions,  which 
(according  to  my  favorite  proverb,  '  extremes  meet,')  the  fool  not 
seldom  obtains  in  as  great  perfection  by  his  ignorance,  as  the 
wise  man  by  the 'highest  energies  of  thought  and  self-discipline. 
Luck  has  a  real  existence  in  human  affairs  from  the  infinite 
number  of  powers  that  are  in  action  at  the  same  time,  and  from 
the  co-existence  of  things  contingent  and  accidental  (such  as  to 
us  at  least  are  accidental)  with  the  regular  appearances  and 
general  laws  of  nature.  A  familiar  instance  will  make  these 
words  intelligible.  The  moon  waxes  and  wanes  according  to  a 
necessary  law.  The  clouds  likewise,  and  all  the  manifold  ap- 


ESSAY    I.  477 

pearances  connected  with  them,  are  governed  by  certain  laws  no 
less  than  the  phases  of  the  moon.  But  the  laws  which  determine 
the  latter  are  known  and  calculable,  while  those  of  the  former 
are  hidden  from  us.  At  all  events,  the  number  and  variety  of 
their  effects  baffle  our  powers  of  calculation  ;  and  that  the  sky  is 
clear  or  obscured  at  any  particular  time,  we  speak  of,  in  common 
language,  as  a  matter  of  accident.  Well  !  at  the  time  of  the 
full  moon,  but  when  the  sky  is  completely  covered  with  black 
clouds,  I  am  walking  on  in  the  dark,  aware  of  no  particular  dan 
ger  :  a  sudden  gust  of  wind  rends  the  cloud  for  a  moment,  and 
the  moon  emerging  discloses  to  me  a  chasm  or  precipice,  to  the 
very  brink  of  which  I  had  advanced  my  foot.  This  is  what  is 
meant  by  luck,  and  according  to  the  more  or  less  serious  mood  or 
habit  of  our  mind  we  exclaim,  how  lucky  !  or,  how  providential ! 
The  co-presence  of  numberless  pliainomena,  which  from  the  com 
plexity  or  subtlety  of  their  determining  causes  are  called  contin 
gencies,  and  the  co-existence  of  these  with  any  regular  or  necessary 
phenomenon  (as  the  clouds  with  the  moon  for  instance)  occasion 
coincidences,  which,  when  they  are  attended  by  any  advantage 
or  injury,  and  are  at  the  same  time  incapable  of  being  calculated 
or  foreseen  by  human  prudence,  form  good  or  ill  luck.  On  a  hot 
sunshiny  afternoon  came  on  a  sudden  storm  and  spoilt  the 
farmer's  hay  :  and  this  is  called  ill  luck.  We  will  suppose  the 
same  event  to  take  place,  when  meteorology  shall  have  been  per 
fected  into  a  science,  provided  with  unerring  instruments  ;  but 
which  the  farmer  had  neglected  to  examine.  This  is  no  longer 
ill  luck,  but  imprudence.  Now  apply  this  to  our  proverb.  Un 
foreseen  coincidences  may  have  greatly  helped  a  man,  yet  if  they 
have  done  for  him  only  what  possibly  from  his  own  abilities  he 
might  have  effected  for  himself,  his  good  luck  will  excite  less  at 
tention  and  the  instance  be  less  remembered.  That  clever  men 
should  attain  their  objects  seems  natural,  and  we  neglect  the  cir 
cumstances  that  perhaps  produced  that  success  of  themselves 
without  the  intervention  of  skill  or  foresight ;  but  we  dwell  on 
the  fact  and  remember  it  as  something  strange,  when  the  same 
happens  to  a  weak  or  ignorant  man.  So.  too,  though  the  latter 
should  fail  in  his  undertakings  from  concurrences  that  might  have 
happened  to  the  wisest  man,  yet  his  failure  being  no  more  than 
might  have  been  expected  and  accounted  for  from  his  folly,  it  lays 
no  hold  on  our  attention,  but  fleets  away  among  the  other  distin- 


478  THIRD    LANDING-PLACE. 

guished  waves  in  which  the  stream  of  ordinary  life  murmurs  by 
us,  and  is  forgotten.  Had  it  been  as  true  as  it  was  notoriously 
false,  that  those  all-embracing  discoveries,  which  have  shed  a 
dawn  of  science  on  the  art  of  chemistry,  and  give  no  obscure 
promise  of  some  one  great  constitutive  law,  in  the  light  of  which 
dwell  dominion  and  the  power  of  prophecy  ;  if  these  discoveries, 
instead  of  having  been  as  they  really  were,  preconcerted  by 
meditation,  and  evolved  out  of  his  own  intellect,  had  occurred  by 
a  set  of  lucky  accidents  to  the  illustrious  father  and  founder  of 
philosophic  alchemy :  if  they  had  presented  themselves  to  Davy 
exclusively  in  consequence  of  his  luck  in  possessing  a  particular 
galvanic  battery  ;  if  this  battery,  as  far  as  Davy  was  concerned, 
had  itself  been  an  accident,  and  not  (as  in  point  of  fact  it  was) 
desired  and  obtained  by  him  for  the  purpose  of  insuring  the  testi 
mony  of  experience  to  his  principles,  and  in  order  to  bind  down 
material  nature  under  the  inquisition  of  reason,  and  force  from 
her,  as  by  torture,  unequivocal  answers  to  prepared  and  precon 
ceived  questions  ; — yet  still  they  would  not  have  been  talked  of  or 
described,  as  instances  of  luck,  but  as  the  natural  results  of  his 
admitted  genius  and  known  skill.  But  should  an  accident  have 
disclosed  similar  discoveries  to  a  mechanic  at  Birmingham  or 
Sheffield,  and  if  the  man  should  grow  rich  in  consequence,  and 
partly  by  the  envy  of  his  neighbors,  and  partly  with  good  reason, 
be  considered  by  them  as  a  man  below  par  in  the  general  powers 
of  his  understanding  ;  then,  "  0  what  a  lucky  fellow  ! — Well, 
Fortune  does  favor  fools — that's  certain! — It  is  always  so!" — 
And  forthwith  the  exclaimer  relates  half  a  dozen  similar  instan 
ces.  Thus  accumulating  the  one  sort  of  facts  and  never  collect 
ing  the  other,  we  do,  as  poets  in  their  diction,  and  quacks  of  all 
denominations  do  in  their  reasoning,  put  a  part  for  the  whole,  and 
at  once  soothe  our  envy  and  gratify  our  love  of  the  marvellous,  by 
the  sweeping  proverb,  '  Fortune  favors  fools.' 


ESSAY   II. 

Quod  me  non  movct  astimatione : 

Vcrum  cst  [ivrijwavvov  mci  sodalis.  CATULLUS.* 

It  interests  me  not  by  any  conceit  of  its  value  ;  but  it  is  a  remembrance 
of  my  honored  friend. 

THE  philosophic  ruler,  who  secured  the  favors  of  fortune  by 
seeking  wisdom  and  knowledge  in  preference  to  them,  has  pa 
thetically  observed — The  heart  knoweth  its  own  bitterness  ;  and 
there  is  a  joy  in  which  the  stranger  intermeddleth  not.  A  simple 
question  founded  on  a  trite  proverb,  with  a  discursive  answer  to 
it,  would  scarcely  suggest  to  an  indifferent  person  any  other  no 
tion  than  that  of  a  mind  at  ease,  amusing  itself  with  its  own  ac 
tivity.  Once  before  (I  believe  about  this  time  last  year)  I  had 
taken  up  the  old  memorandum-book,  from  which  I  transcribed 
the  preceding  essay,  and  it  had  then  attracted  my  notice  by  the 
name  of  the  illustrious  chemist  mentioned  in  the  last  illustration. 
Exasperated  by  the  base  and  cowardly  attempt  which  had  been 
made  to  detract  from  the  honors  due  to  his  astonishing  genius,  I 
had  slightly  altered  the  concluding  sentences,  substituting  the 
more  recent  for  his  earlier  discoveries  ;  and  without  the  most 
distant  intention  of  publishing  what  I  then  wrote,  I  had  express 
ed  my  own  convictions  for  the  gratification  of  my  own  feelings, 
and  finished  by  tranquilly  paraphrasing  into  a  chemical  allegory 
the  Homeric  adventure  of  Menelaus  with  Proteus.  Oh  !  with 
what  different  feelings,  with  what  a  sharp  and  sudden  emotion 
did  I  re-peruse  the  same  question  yester-morning,  having  by  ac 
cident  opened  the  book  at  the  page  upon  which  it  was  written. 
I  was  moved  :  for  it  was  Admiral  Sir  Alexander  Ball  who  first 
proposed  the  question  to  me,  and  the  particular  satisfaction  which 
he  exprdised,  had  occasioned  me  to  note  down  the  substance  of  my 
reply.  I  was  moved  :  because  to  this  conversation  I  was  in 
debted  for  the  friendship  and  confidence  with  which  he  after- 
*  XIL—Ed. 


480  THIRD    LANDING-PLACE. 

wards  honored  me  ;  and  because  it  recalled  the  memory  of  one 
of  the  most  delightful  mornings  I  ever  passed  ;  when,  as  we  were 
riding  together,  the  same  person  related  to  me  the  principal  events 
of  his  own  life,  and  introduced  them  by  adverting  to  this  conver 
sation.  It  recalled,  too,  the  deep  impression  left  on  my  mind 
by  that  narrative,  the  impression,  that  I  had  never  known  any 
analogous  instance,  in  which  a  man  so  successful  had  been  so 
little  indebted  to  fortune,  or  lucky  accidents,  or  so  exclusively 
both  the  architect  and  builder  of  his  own  success.  The  sum  of 
his  history  may  be  comprised  in  this  one  sentence  :  Ucec,  sub 
numine  nobismet  fecimus,  sapientia  duce,  fortuna  permittente. 
(These  things,  under  God,  we  have  done  for  ourselves,  through 
the  guidance  of  wisdom,  and  with  the  permission  of  fortune.) 
Luck  gave  him  nothing  :  in  her  most  generous  moods,  she  only 
worked  with  him  as  with  a  friend,  not  for  him  as  for  a  fondling ; 
but  more  often  she  simply  stood  neuter,  and  suffered  him  to  work 
for  himself.  Ah  !  how  could  I  be  otherwise  than  affected  by 
whatever  reminded  me  of  that  daily  and  familiar  intercourse  with 
him,  which  made  the  fifteen  months  from  May  1804,  to  October 
1805,  in  many  respects,  the  most  memorable  and  instructive  pe 
riod  of  my  life  ? — Ah  !  how  could  I  be  otherwise  than  most  deeply 
affected,  when  there  was  still  lying  on  my  table  the  paper  which, 
the  day  before,  had  conveyed  to  me  the  unexpected  and  most 
awful  tidings  of  this  man's  death, — his  death  in  the  fulness  of 
all  his  powers,  in  the  rich  autumn  of  ripe  yet  undecaying  man 
hood  ?  I  once  knew  a  lady,  who  after  the  loss  of  a  lovely  child 
continued  for  several  days  in  a  state  of  seeming  indifference,  the 
weather,  at  the  same  time,  as  if  in  unison  with  her,  being  calm, 
though  gloomy  ;  till  one  morning  a  burst  of  sunshine  breaking 
in  upon  her,  and  suddenly  lighting  up  the  room  where  she  was 
sitting,  she  dissolved  at  once  into  tears,  and  wept  passionately. 
In  no  very  dissimilar  manner  did  the  sudden  gleam  of  recollection 
at  the  sight  of  this  memorandum  act  on  myself.  I  had  been 
stunned  by  the  intelligence,  as  by  an  outward  blow,  till  this  tri 
fling  incident  startled  and  disentranced  me  ;  the  sudden  pang 
shivered  through  my  whole  frame  ;  and  if  I  repressed  the  out 
ward  shows  of  sorrow,  it  was  by  force  that  I  repressed  tkem,  and 
because  it  is  not  by  tears  that  I  ought  to  mourn  for  the  loss  of 
Sir  Alexander  Ball, 

He  was  a  man  above  his  age  :  but  for  that  very  reason  the 


ESSAY    II.  481 

age  has  the  more  need  to  have  the  master-features  of  his  char 
acter  portrayed  and  preserved.  This  I  feel  it  my  duty  to  at 
tempt,  and  this  alone  :  for  having  received  neither  instructions 
iior  permission  from  the  family  of  the  deceased,  I  can  not  think 
myself  allowed  to  enter  into  the  particulars  of  his  private  his 
tory,  strikingly  as  many  of  them  Avould  illustrate  the  elements 
and  composition  of  his  rnind.  For  he  was  indeed  a  living  con 
futation  of  the  assertion  attributed  to  the  Prince  of  Conde,  that 
no  man  appeared  great  to  his  valet  dc  ch-ambre — a  saying  which, 
I  suspect,  owes  its  currency  less  to  its  truth,  than  to  the  envy  of 
mankind  and  the  misapplication  of  the  word,  great,  to  actions 
unconnected  with  reason  and  free  will.  It  will  be  sufficient  for 
my  purpose  to  observe  that  the  purity  and  strict  propriety  of  his 
conduct,  which  precluded  rather  than  silenced  calumny,  the 
evenness  of  his  temper  and  his  attentive  and  affectionate  man 
ners,  in  private  life,  greatly  aided  and  increased  his  public  utility : 
and,  if  it  should  please  Providence,  that  a  portion  of  his  spirit 
should  descend  with  his  mantle,  the  virtues  of  Sir  Alexander 
Ball,  as  a  master,  a  husband,  and  a  parent,  will  form  a  no  less 
remarkable  epoch  in  the  moral  history  of  the  Maltese  than  his 
wisdom,  as  a  governor,  has  made  in  that  of  their  outward  cir 
cumstances.  That  the  private  and  personal  qualities  of  a  first 
magistrate  should  have  political  effects,  will  appear  strange  to 
n-o  reflecting  Englishman,  who  has  attended  to  the  workings  of 
men's  minds  during  the  first  ferment  of  revolutionary  principles, 
and  must  therefore  have  witnessed  the  influence  of  our  own 
sovereign's  domestic  character  in  counteracting  them.  But  in 
Malta  there  were  circumstances  wrhich  rendered  such  an  example 
peculiarly  requisite  and  beneficent.  The  very  existence,  for  so 
many  generations,  of  an  order  of  lay  celibates  in  that  island, 
who  abandoned  even  the  outward  shows  of  an  adherence  to  their 
vow  of  chastity,  must  have  had  .pernicious  effects  on  the  morals 
of  the  inhabitants.  But  when  it  is  considered  too  that  the 
knights  of  Malta  had  been  for  the  last  fifty  years  or  more  a  set 
of  useless  idlers,  generally  illiterate,* — for  they  thought  litera- 

*  The  personal  effects  of  every  knight  were,  after  his  death,  appropri 
ated  to  the  Order,  and  his  books,  if  he  had  any,  devolved  to  the  public 
library.  This  library  therefore,  which  has  been  accumulating  from  the 
time  of  their  first  settlement  in  the  island,  is  a  fair  criterion*  of  the  nature 
and  degree  of  their  literary  studies,  as  an  average.  Even  in  respect  to 

VOL.  II.  X 


482  THIRD    LANDING-PLACE. 

ture  no  part  of  a  soldier's  excellence  ;  and  yet  effeminate, — for 
they  were  soldiers  in  name  only  :  when  it  is  considered,  that 
they  were,  moreover,  all  of  them  aliens,  who  looked  upon  them 
selves  not  merely  as  of  a  superior  rank  to  the  native  nobles,  but 
as  beings  of  a  different  race  (I  had  almost  said,  species),  from 
the  Maltese  collectively  ;  and  finally  that  these  men  possessed 
exclusively  the  government  of  the  island ;  it  may  be  safely  con 
cluded  that  they  were  little  better  than  a  perpetual  influenza, 
relaxing  and  diseasing  the  hearts  of  all  the  families  within  their 
sphere  of  influence.  Hence  the  peasantry,  who  fortunately  were 
below  their  reach,  notwithstanding  the  more  than  .childish  igno 
rance  in  which  they  were  kept  by  their  priests,  yet  compared 
with  the  middle  and  higher  classes,  were  both  in  mind  and  body 
as  ordinary  men  compared  with  dwarfs.  Every  respectable 
family  had  some  one  knight  for  their  patron,  as  a  matter  of 
course  ;  and  to  him  the  honor  of  a  sister  or  a  daughter  was  sac 
rificed,  equally  as  a  matter  of  course.*1  But  why  should  I  thus 
disguise  the  truth  ?  Alas  !  in  nine  instances  out  of  ten,  this  pa 
tron  was  the  common  paramour  of  every  woman  in  the  family, 
Were  I  composing  a  state-memorial,  I  should  abstain  from  all 
allusion  to  moral  good  or  evil,  as  not  having  now  first  to  learn, 
that  with  diplomatists  and  with  practical  statesmen  of  every  de 
nomination,  it  Avould  preclude  all  attention  to  its  other  contents, 
and  have  no  result  but  that  of  securing  for  its  author's  name  the 
official  private  mark  of  exclusion  or  dismission,  as  a  weak  or 
suspicious  person.  But  among  those  for  whom  I  am  now  writ 
ing,  there  are,  I.  trust,  many  who  will  think  it  not  the  feeblest 
reason  for  rejoicing  in  our  possession  of  Malta,  and  not  the  least 
worthy  motive  for  wishing  its  retention,  that  one  source  of 
human  misery  and  corruption  has  been  dried  up.  Such  persons 
will  hear  the  name  of  Sir  Alexander  Ball  with  additional  rever 
ence,  as  of  one  who  has  made  the  protection  of  Great  Britain  a 
double  blessing  to  the  Maltese,  and  broken  the  bonds  of  iniquity, 
as  well  as  unlocked  the  fetters  of  political  oppression. 

When  we  are  praising  the  departed  by  our  own  fire-sides,  we 
dwell  most  fondly  on  those  qualities  which  had  won  our  personal 

works  of  military  science,  it  is  contemptible — as  the  sole  public  library  of 
so  numerous  and  opulent  an  order,  most  contemptible — and  in  all  other  de 
partments  of  literature  it  is  below  contempt. 
*  See  Table  Talk,  VI.  p.  509.— Ed. 


ESSAY    II.  483 

affection,  and  which  sharpen  our  individual  regrets.  But  when 
impelled  by  a  loftier  and  more  meditative  sorrow,  we  would  raise 
a  public  monument  to  their  memory,  we  praise  them  appropri 
ately  when  we  relate  their  actions  faithfully  ;  and  thus  preserving 
their  example  for  the  imitation  of  the  living,  alleviate  the  loss, 
while  we  demonstrate  its  magnitude.  My  funeral  eulogy  of  Sir 
Alexander  Ball  must  therefore  be  a  narrative  of  his  life  ;  and  this 
friend  of  mankind  will  be  defrauded  of  honor  in  proportion  as  that 
narrative  is  deficient  and  fragmentary.  It  shall,  however,  be  as 
complete  as  my  information  enables,  and  as  prudence  and  a 
proper  respect  for  the  feelings  of  the  living  permit,  me  to  render  it. 
His  fame  (I  adopt  the  words  of  our  elder  writers)  is  so  great 
throughout  the  world  that  he  stands  in  no  need  of  an  encomium  ; 
and  yet  his  worth  is  much  greater  than  his  fame.  It  is  impossi 
ble  not  to  speak  great  things  of  him,  and  yet  it  will  be  very  diffi 
cult  to  speak  what  he  deserves.  But  custom  requires  that  some 
thing  should  be  said  ;  it  is  a  duty  and  a  debt  which  we  owe  to 
ourselves  and  to  mankind,  not  less  than  to  his  memory  ;  and  I 
hope  his  great  soul,  if  it  hath  any  knowledge  of  what  is  done 
here  below,  will  not  be  offended  at  the  smallness  even  of  my  offering. 
Ah  !  how  little,  when  among  the  subjects  of  The  Friend  I 
promised  "  characters  met  with  in  real  life,"  did  I  anticipate  the 
sad  event,  which  compels  me  to  weave  on  a  cypress  branch  those 
sprays  of  laurel  which  I  had  destined  for  his  bust,  not  his  monu 
ment  !  He  lived  as  we  should  all  live  ;  and,  I  doubt  not,  left 
the  world  as  we  should  all  wish  to  leave  it.  Such  is  the  power 
of  dispensing  blessings,  which  Providence  has. attached  to  the 
truly  great  and  good,  that  they  can  not  even  die  without  ad 
vantage  to  their  fellow-creatures  ;  for  death  consecrates  their  ex 
ample  ;  and  the  wisdom,  which  might  have  been  slighted  at  the 
council-table,  becomes  oracular  from  the  shrine.  Those  rare  ex 
cellencies,  which  make  our  grief  poignant,  make  it  likewise  profit 
able  ;  and  the  tears,  which  wise  men  shed  for  the  departure  of 
the  wise,  are  among  those  that  are  preserved  in  heaven.  It  is  the 
fervent  aspiration  of  my  spirit,  that  I  may  so  perform  the  task 
which  private  gratitude,  and  public  duty  impose  on  me,  that,  "  as 
God  hath  cut  this  tree  of  paradise  down  from  its  seat  of  earth,  the 
dead  trunk  may  yet  support  a  part  of  the  declining  temple,  or  at 
least  serve  to  kindle  the  fire  on  the  altar."*1 
*  Jer.  Taylor. 


ESSAY    III. 

Si  partem  tacuisse  velim,  quodcumque  relinquam, 

Majus  erit.      Vetcres  actus,  primamque  juvcntarn 

Prosequar?     Ad  sese  mentem  prcesentia,  ducunt. 

Narrem  justitiam  ?     Resplendet  gloria  Martis. 

Armati  referam  vires  ?     Plus  egit  inermis.  CLAUDIAX.* 

If  I  desire  to  pass  over  a  part  in  silence,  whatever  I  omit,  will  seem  the 
most  worthy  to  have  been  recorded.  Shall  I  pursue  his  old  exploits  and 
early  youth  ?  His  recent  merits  recall  the  mind  to  themselves.  Shall  I 
dwell  on  his  justice  ?  The  glory  of  the  warrior  rises  before  me  resplendent. 
Shall  I  relate  his  strength  in  arms  ?  He  performed  yet  greater  things  un 
armed. 

"  THERE  is  something,"  says  Harrington,!  "  first  in  the  making 
of  a  commonwealth,  then  in  the  governing  of -it,  and  last  of  all  in  the 
leading  of  its  armies,  which,  though  there  be  great  divines,  great 
laAvyers,  great  men  in  all  ranks  of  life,  seems  to  be  peculiar  only  to 
the  genius  of  a  gentleman.  For  so  it  is  in  the  universal  series  of 
story,  that  if  any  man  has  founded  a  commonwealth,  he  was  first 
a  gentleman."  Such  also,  he  adds,  as  have  got  any  fame  as  civil 
governors,  have  been  gentlemen,  or  persons  of  known  descents. 
Sir  Alexander  Ball  was  a  gentleman  by  birth  ;  a  younger  brother 
of  an  old  and  respectable  family  in  Gloucestershire.  He  went 
into  the  navy  at  an  early  age  from  his  choice,  and  as  he  himself 
told  me,  in  consequence  of  the  deep  impression  and  vivid  images 
left  on  his  mind  by  the  perusal  of  Hobinson  Crusoe.  It  is  not  my 
intention  to  detail  the  steps  of  his  promotion,  or  the  services  in 
which  he  was  engaged  as  a  subaltern.  I  recollect  many  partic 
ulars  indeed,  but  not  the  dates,  with  such  distinctness  as  would 
enable  me  to  state  them  (as  it  would  be  necessary  to  do  if  1 
stated  them  at  all)  in  the  order  of  time.  These  dates  might, 
perhaps,  have  been  procured  from  other  sources  ;  but  incidents 
that  are  neither  characteristic  nor  instructive,  even  such  as  would 

*  De  Laud.  Stilic.  i.  13. — Ed.         f  Preliminaries  to  Oceana,  p.  i. — Ed. 


ESSAY    III.  485 

be  expected  with  reason  in  a  regular  life,  are  no  part  of  my  plan  ; 
while  those  which  are  both  interesting  and  illustrative  I  have 
been  precluded  from  mentioning,  some  from  motives  which  have 
been  already  explained,  and  others  from  still  higher  considera 
tions.  The  most  important  of  these  may  be  deduced  from  a  re 
flection  with  which  he  himself  once  concluded  a  long  and  affect 
ing  narration  ;  namely,  that  no  body  of  men  can  for  any  length 
of  time  be  safely  treated  otherwise  than  as  rational  beings  ;  and 
that,  therefore,  the  education  of  the  lower  classes  was  of  the  ut 
most  consequence  to  the  permanent  security  of  the  empire,  even 
for  the  sake  of  our  navy.  The  dangers,  apprehended  from  the 
education  of  the  lower  classes,  arose  (he  said)"entirely  from  its  not 
being  universal,  and  from  the  unusualness  in  the  lowest  classes 
of  those  accomplishments,  which  he,  like  Dr.  Bell,  regarded  as  one 
of  the  means  of  education,  and  not  as  education  itself*  If,  he  ob 
served,  the  lower  classes  in  general  possessed  but  one  eye  or  one  arm, 
the  few  who  were  so  fortunate  as  to  possess  two  would  naturally 
become  vain  and  restless,  and  consider  themselves  as  entitled  to  a 
higher  situation.  He  illustrated  this  by  the  faults  attributed  to 
learned  women,  and  that  the  same  objections  were  formerly  made  to 
educating  women  at  all  ;  namely,  that  their  knowledge  made  them 
vain,  affected,  and  neglectful  of  their  proper  duties.  Now  that 
all  women  of  condition  arc  well-educated,  we  hear  no  more  of 
these  apprehensions,  or  observe  any  instances  to  justify  them. 
Yet  if  a  lady  understood  the  Greek  one-tenth  part  as  well  as  the 
whole  circle  of  her  acquaintances  understood  the  French  lan 
guage,  it  would  not  surprise  us  to  find  her  less  pleasing  from  the 
consciousness  of  her  superiority  in  the  possession  of  an  unusual 
advantage.  Sir  Alexander  Ball  quoted  the  speech  of  an  old  ad 
miral,  one  of  whose  two  great  wishes  was  to  have  a  ship's  crew 
composed  altogether  of  serious  Scotchmen.  He  spoke  with  great 
reprobation  of  the  vulgar  notion,  the  worse  man,  the  better  sailor. 
Courage,  he  said,  was  the  natural  product  of  familiarity  with 
danger,  which  thoughtlessness  would  oftentimes  turn  into  fool- 
hardiness  ;  arid  that  he  had  always  found  the  most  usefully  brave 

*  "Which  consists  in  educing,  or  to  adopt  Dr.  Bell's  own  expression,  elicit 
ing  the  faculties  of  the  human  mind,  and  at  the  same  time  subordinating 
them  to  the  reason  and  conscience ;  varying  the  means  of  this  common  end 
according  to  the  sphere  and  particular  mode,  in  which  the  individual  is 
likely  to  act  and  become  useful. 


486  THIRD    LANDING-PLACE. 

sailors  the  gravest  and  most  rational  of  his  crew.  The  best  sailor 
he  had  ever  had,  first  attracted  his  notice  by  the  anxiety  which 
he  expressed  concerning  the  means  of  remitting  some  money 
which  he  had  received  in  the  West  Indies  to  his  sister  in  Eng 
land  ;  and  this  man,  without  any  tinge  of  method  ism,  was  never 
heard  to  swear  an  oath,  and  was  remarkable  for  the  firmness 
with  w^hich  he  devoted  a  part  of  every  Sunday  to  the  reading  of 
his  Bible.  I  record  this  with  satisfaction  as  a  testimony  of  great 
weight,  and  in  all  respects  unexceptionable  ;  for  Sir  Alexander 
Ball's  opinions  throughout  life  remained  unwarped  by  zealotry, 
and  were  those  of  a  mind  seeking  after  truth  in  calmness  and 
complete  self-possession.  He  was  much  pleased  with  an  unsus 
picious  testimony  furnished  by  Dampier.  "  I  have  particularly 
observed,"  writes  this  famous  old  navigator,*  "  there  and  in 
other  places,  that  such  as  had  been  well-bred,  were  generally 
most  careful  to  improve  their  time,  and  would  be  very  industrious 
and  frugal  where  there  was  any  probability  of  considerable  gain  ; 
but  on  the  contrary,  such  as  had  been  bred  up  in  ignorance  and 
hard  labor,  when  they  carne  to  have  plenty  would  extravagantly 
squander  away  their  time  and  money  in  drinking  and  making  a 
bluster."  Indeed,  it  is  a  melancholy  proof,  how  strangely  power 
warps  the  minds  of  ordinary  men,  that  there  can  be  a  doubt  on 
this  subject  among  persons  who  have  been  themselves  educated. 
It  tempts  a  suspicion,  that  unknown  to  themselves  they  find  a 
comfort  in  the  thought  that  their  inferiors  are  something  less  than 
men  :  or  that  they  have  an  uneasy  half-consciousness  that,  if  this 
were  not  the  case,  they  would  themselves  have  no  claim  to  be 
their  superior.  For  a  sober  education  naturally  inspires  self-re 
spect.  But  he  who  respects  himself  will  respect  others  ;  and  he 
who  respects  both  himself  and  others,  -must  of  necessity  be  a  brave 
man.  The  great  importance  of  this  subject,  arid  the  increasing 
interest  which  good  men  of  all  denominations  feel  in  the  bringing 
about  of  a  national  education,  must  be  my  excuse  for  having  en 
tered  so  minutely  into  Sir  Alexander  Ball's  opinions  on  this  head, 
in  which,  however,  I  am  the  more  excusable,  being  now  ori  that 
part  of  his  life  which  I  am  obliged  to  leave  almost  a  blank. 

During  his  lieutenancy,  and  after  he  had  perfected  himself  in 
the  knowledge  and  duties  of  a  practical  sailor,  he  was  compelled 
by  the  state  of  his  health  to  remain  in  England  for  a  considerable 
*  Vol.  II.  P.  ii.  p.  89.— .EW. 


ESSAY    III.  487 

length  of  time.  Of  this  he  industriously  availed  himself  for  the 
acquirement  of  suhstaiitial  knowledge  from  books  ;  and  during 
his  whole  life  afterwards,  he  considered  those  as  his  happiest 
hours,  which,  without  any  neglect  of  official  or  professional  duty, 
he  could  devote  to  reading.  He  preferred,  indeed  he  almost  con 
fined  himself  to,  history,  political  economy,  voyages  and  travels, 
natural  history,  and  latterly  agricultural  works  :  in  short,  to  such 
books  as  contain  specific  facts,  or  practical  principles  capable  of 
specific  application.  His  active  life,  and  the  particular  objects 
of  immediate  utility,  some  one  of  which  he  had  always  in  his 
view,  precluded  a  taste  for  works  of  pure  speculation  and  ab 
stract  science,  though  he  highly  honored  those  who  were  emi 
nent  in  these  respects,  and  considered  them  as  the  benefactors 
of  mankind,  no  less  than  those  who  afterwards  discovered  the 
mode  of  applying  their  principles,  or  who  realized  them  in  prac 
tice.  Works  of  amusement,  as  novels,  plays,  and  the  like  did  not 
appear  even  to  amuse  him  ;  and  the  only  poetical  composition, 
of  which  I  have  ever  heard  him  speak,  was  a  manuscript^  poem 
written  by  one  of  my  friends,  which  I  read  to  his  lady  in  his 
presence.  To  my  surprise  he  afterwards  spoke  of  this  with 
warm  interest ;  but  it  was  evident  to  me,  that  it  was  not  so 
much  the  poetic  merit  of  the  composition  that  had  interested 
him,  as  the  truth  and  psychological  insight  with  which  it  repre 
sented  the  practicability  of  rc'ibrming  the  most  hardened  minds, 
and  the  various  accidents  which  may  awaken  the  most  brutal 
ized  person  to  a  recognition  of  his  nobler  being.  I  will  add  one 
remark  of  his  own  knowledge  acquired  from  books,  which  appears 
to  me  both  just  and  valuable.  The  prejudice  against  such 
knowledge,  he  said,  and  the  custom  of  opposing  it  to  that  which 
is  learnt  by  practice,  originated  in  those  times  when  books  were 
almost  confined  to  theology  and  to  logical  and  metaphysical 
subtleties  ;  but  that  at  present  there  is  scarcely  any  practical 
knowledge,  which  is  not  to  be  found  in  books  :  the  press  is  the 
means  by  which  intelligent  men  now  converse  with  each  other, 
and  persons  of  all  classes  and  all  pursuits  convey,  each  the  con 
tribution  of  his  individual  experience.  It  was  therefore,  he- said. 
as  absurd  to  hold  book-knowledge  at  present  in  contempt,  as  it 
would  be  for  a  man  to  avail  himself  only  of  his  own  eyes  and 

*  Though  it  remains,  I  believe,  unpublished,  I  can  not  resist  the  ternpta- 
tion  of  recording  that  it  was  Mr.  Wordsworth's  Peter  Bell.     1817. 


,488  THJK1)     LANDING-PLACE. 

ears,  and  to  aim  at  nothing  which  could  not  be  performed  ex 
clusively  by  his  own  arms.  The  use  and  necessity  of  personal 
experience  consisted  in  the  power  of  choosing  and  applying  Avhat 
had  been  read,  and  of  discriminating  by  the  light  of  analogy  the 
practicable  from  the  impracticable,  and  probability  from  mere 
plausibility.  Without  a  judgment  matured  and  steadied  by  ac 
tual  experience,  a  man  would  read  to  little  or  perhaps  to  bad 
purpose ;  but  yet  that  experience,  which  in  exclusion  of  all  other 
knowledge  has  been  derived  from  one  man's  life,  is  in  the  present 
day  scarcely  worthy  of  the  name — at  least  for  those  who  are  to 
act  in  the  higher  and  wider  spheres  of  duty.  An  ignorant  gen 
eral,  he  said,  inspired  him  with  terror  ;  for  if  he  were  too  proud 
to  take  advice  he  would  ruin  himself  by  his  own  blunders  ;  and 
if  he  were  not,  by  adopting  the  worst  that  was  offered.  A  great 
genius  may  indeed  form  an  exception  ;  but  we  do  not  lay  down 
rules  in  expectation  of  wonders.  A  similar  remark  I  remember 
to  have  heard  from  an  officer,  who  to  eminence  in  professional 
science  arid  the  gallantry  of  a  tried  soldier,  adds  all  the  accom 
plishments  of  a  sound  scholar  and  the  powers  of  a  man  of  genius. 
One  incident,  which  happened  at  this  period  of  Sir  Alexander's 
life,  is  so  illustrative  of  his  character,  and  furnishes  so  strong  a 
presumption  that  the  thoughtful  humanity  by  which  he  was  dis 
tinguished  wras  not  wholly  the  growth  of  his  latter  years,  that, 
though  it  may  appear  to  some  trifling  in  itself,  I  will  insert  it  in 
this  place,  with  the  occasion  on  which  it  wras  communicated  to 
me.  In  a*large  party  at  the  Grand  Master's  palace,  I  had  ob 
served  a  naval  officer  of  distinguished  merit  listening  to  Sir 
Alexander  Ball,  whenever  he  joined  in  the  conversation,  with  so 
marked  a  pleasure,  that  it  seemed  as  if  his  very  voice,  inde 
pendently  of  what  Ire  said,  had  been  delightful  to  him  :  and  once 
as  he  fixed  his  eyes  on  Sir  Alexander  Ball,  I  could  not  but  notice 
the  mixed  expression  of  awe  and  affection,  which  gave  a  more 
than  common  interest  to  so  manly  a  countenance.  During  his 
stay  in  the  island,  this  officer  honored  me  not  unfrequently  with 
his  visits ;  and  at  the  conclusion  of  my  last  conversation  with 
him,  in  which  I  had  dwelt  on  the  wisdom  of  the  Governor's*1 

*  Such  Sir  Alexander  Ball  was  in  reality,  and  such  was  his  general  ap 
pellation  in  the  .Mediterranean:  I  adopt  this  title,  therefore,  to  avoid  the 
ungraceful  repetition  of  his  own  name  on  the  one  hand,  and  on  the  other 
the  confusion  which  might  arise  from  the  use  of  his  real  title,  namely,  "  His 


ESSAY    TIT.  489 

conduct  in  a  recent  and  difficult  emergency,  he  told  me  that  he 
considered  himself  as  indebted  to  the  same  excellent  person  for 
that  which  was  dearer  to  him  than  his  life.  "  Sir  Alexander 
Ball,"  said  he,  "has  (I  dare  say)  forgotten  the  circumstance; 
but  when  he  was  Lieutenant  Ball,  he  was  the  officer  whom  I 
accompanied  in  my  first  boat-expedition,  being  then  a  midship 
man  and  only  in  my  fourteenth  year.  As  we  Avere  rowing  up  to 
the  vessel  which  we  were  to  attack,  amid  a  discharge  of  mus 
ketry,  I  was  overpowered  by  fear,  my  knees  trembled  under  me, 
and  I  seemed  on  the  point  of  fainting  away.  Lieutenant  Ball, 
who  saw  the  condition  I  was  in,  placed  himself  close  beside  me, 
and  still  keeping  his  countenance  directed  toward  the  enemy, 
took  hold  of  my  hand,  and  pressing  it  in  the  most  friendly  man 
ner,  said  in  a  low  voice,  '  Courage,  my  dear  boy  !  don't  be  afraid 
of  yourself !  you  will  recover  in  a  minute  or  so — I  Avas  just  the 
same,  when  I  first  went  out  in  this  way.'  Sir,"  added  the  offi 
cer  to  me,  "  it  was  as  if  an.  angel  had  put  a  new  soul  into  me. 
With  the  feeling,  that  I  was  not  yet  dishonored,  the  Avhole  bur 
then  of  agony  Avas  removed  ;  and  from  that  moment  I  Avas  as 
fearless  and  forward  as  the  oldest  of  the  boat's  creAV,  and  on  our 
return  the  lieutenant  spoke  highly  of  me  to  our  captain.  I  am 
scarcely  less  convinced  of  my  own  being,  than  that  I  should  haAre 
been  what  I  tremble  to  think  of,  if,  instead  of  his  humane  en 
couragement,  he  had  at  that  moment  scoffed,  threatened,  or  rc- 
Ari]ed  me.  And  this  was  the  more  kind  in  him,  because,  as  I 
afterAvards  understood,  his  OAVU  conduct  in  his  first  trial  had 
evinced  to  all  appearances  the  greatest  fearlessness,  and  that  he 
said  this  therefore  only  to  give  me  heart,  and  restore  me  to  my 
OAVII  good  opinion."  This  anecdote,  I  trust,  will  have  some 
weight  Avith  those  Avho  may  have  lent  an  ear  to  any  of  those 
vague  calumnies  from  which  110  naval  commander  can  secure  his 
good  name,  Avho,  knowing  the  paramount  necessity  of  regularity 
and  strict  discipline  in  a  ship  of  Avar,  adopts  an  appropriate  plan 

Majesty's  civil  Commissioner  for  the  island  of  Malta  and  its  Dependencies ; 
and  Minister  Plenipotentiary  to  the  Order  of  St.  John."  This  is  not  the 
place  to  expose  the  timid  and  unsteady  policy  which  continued  the  latter 
title,  or  the  petty  jealousies  which  interfered  to  prevent  Sir  Alexander 
Bull  from  having  the  title  of  Governor,  from  one  of  the  very  causes  which 
rendered  him  fittest  for  the  office. 

(See  Table  Talk,  VI.  p.  507.—  E<1) 
x* 


490  THIRD    LANDING-PLACE. 

for  the  attainment  of  these  objects,  and  remains  constant  and 
immutable  in  the  execution.  To  an  Athenian,  who,  in  praising 
a  public  functionary,  had  said  that  every  one  either  applauded 
him  or  left  him  without  censure,  a  philosopher  replied — "  How 
seldom  then  must  he  have  done  his  duty  !" 

Of  Sir  Alexander  Ball's  character,  as  Captain  Ball,  of  his 
measures  as  a  disciplinarian,  and  of  the  wise  and  dignified  prin 
ciple  on  which  he  grounded  those  measures,  I  have  already  spo 
ken  in  a  former  part  of  this  work,*1  and  must  content  myself 
therefore  with  entreating  the  reader  to  re-peruse  that  passage  as 
belonging  to  this  place,  and  as  a  part  of  the  present  narration. 
Ah  !  little  did  I  expect  at  the  time  I  wrote  that  account,  that 
the  motives  of  delicacy,  which  then  impelled  me  to  withhold  the 
name,  would  so  soon  be  exchanged  for  the  higher  duty  which 
now  justifies  me  in  adding  it !  At  the  thought  of  such  events 
the  language  of  a  tender  superstition  is  the  voice  of  nature  it 
self,  and  those  facts  alone  presenting  themselves  to  our  memory 
which  had  left  an  impression  on  our  hearts,  we  assent  to  and 
adopt  the  poet's  pathetic  complaint : 

0,  Sir  !  the  good  die  first, 


And  those  whose  hearts  are  dry  as  summer  dust, 
Burn  to  the  socket.f 

Thus  that  the  humane  plan  described  in  the  pages  now  re 
ferred  to,  a  system  in  pursuance  of  which  the  captain  of  a  man 
of  war  uniformly  regarded  his  sentences  not  as  dependent  on  his 
own  will,  or  to  be  affected  by  the  state  of  his  feelings  at  the  mo 
ment,  but  as  the  pre-established  determinations  of  known  laws, 
and  himself  as  the  voice  of  the  law  in  pronouncing  the  sentence, 
arid  its  delegate  in  enforcing  the  execution,  could  not  but  furnish 
occasional  food  to  the  spirit  of  detraction,  must  be  evident  to 
every  reflecting  mind.  It  is  indeed  little  less  than  impossible, 
that  he,  who  in  order  to  be  effectively  humane  determines  to  be 
inflexibly  just,  and  who  is  inexorable  to  his  own  feelings  when 
they  would  interrupt  the  course  of  justice  ;  who  looks  at  each 
particular  act  by  the  light  of  all  its  consequences,  and  as  the  rep 
resentative  of  ultimate  good  or  evil,  should  not  sometimes  be 
charged  with  tyranny  by  weak  minds.  And  it  is  too  certain 
that  the  calumny  will  be  willingly  believed  and  eagerly  propa- 
*  Essay  p.  157. — Ed.  f  Excursion,  B.  I. — Ed. 


ESSAY    IV.  491 

gated  by  all  those,  who  should  shun  the  presence  of  an  eye  keen 
in  the  detection  of  imposture,  incapacity,  and  misconduct,  and  of 
a  resolution  as  steady  in  their  exposure.  We  soon  hate  the  man 
whose  qualities  we  dread,  and  thus  have  a  double  interest,  an  in 
terest  of  passion  as  well  as  of  policy,  in  decrying  and  defaming 
him.  But  good  men  will  rest  satisfied  with  the  promise  made  to 
them  by  the  Divine  Comforter,  that  by  her  children  shall  wis 
dom  be  justified. 


ESSAY  IV. 

the  generous  spirit,  who,  when  brought 

Among  the  tasks  of  real  life,  hath  wrought 

Upon  the  plan  that  pleased  his  childish  thought ; 

Whose  high  endeavors  are  an  inward  light 

That  make  the  path  before  him  always  bright ; 

Who  doomed  to  go  in  company  with  pain, 

And  fear  and  bloodshed,  miserable  train  ! 

Turns  his  necessity  to  glorious  gain  ; 

By  objects,  which  might  force  the  soul  to  abate 

Her  feeling,  rendered  more  compassionate.       WORDSWORTH.* 

AT  the  close  of  the  American  war,  Captain  Ball  was  intrusted 
with  the  protection  and  convoying  of  an  immense  mercantile  fleet 
to  America,  and  by  his  great  prudence  and  unexampled  attention 
to  the  interests  of  all  arid  each,  he  endeared  his  name  to  the 
American  merchants,  and  laid  the  foundation  of  that  high  re 
spect  and  predilection  which  both  the  Americans  and  their  gov 
ernment  ever  afterwards  entertained  for  him.  My  recollection 
does  not  enable  me  to  attempt  any  accuracy  in  the  date  or  cir 
cumstances,  or  to  add  the  particulars,  of  his  services  in  the  West 
Indies  and  on  the  coast  of  America.  I  now  therefore  merely  al 
lude  to  the  fact  with  a  prospective  reference  to  opinions  and  cir 
cumstances,  which  I  shall  have  to  mention  hereafter.  Shortly 
after  the  general  peace  was  established,  Captain  Ball,  who  was 
now  a  married  man,  passed  some  time  with  his  lady  in  France, 
and,  if  I  mistake  not,  at  Xantes.  At  the  same  lime,  and  in  the 
*  The  Christian  Warrior. — Ed. 


492  .THIRD    LANDING-PLACE. 

same  town,  among  the  other  English  visitors,  Lord  (then  Captain) 
Nelson  happened  to  be  one.  In  consequence  of  some  punctilio,  as 
to  whose  business  it  was  to  paf  the  compliment  of  the  first  call, 
they  never  met,  and  this  trifling  affair  occasioned  a  coldness  be 
tween  the  two  naval  commanders,  or  in  truth  a  mutual  prejudice 
against  each  other.  Some  years  after,  both  their  ships  being  to 
gether  close  ofT  Minorca  and  near  Port  Mahon,  a  violent  storm 
nearly  disabled  Nelson's  vessel,  and  in  addition  to  the  fury  of  the 
wind,  it  was  night-time  and  the  thickest  darkness.  Captain  Ball, 
however,  brought  his  vessel  at  length  to  Nelson's  assistance,  took 
his  ship  in  tow,  and  used  his  best  endeavors  to  bring  her  and  his 
own  vessel  into  Port  Mahon.  The  difficulties  and  the  dangers 
increased.  Nelson  considered  the  case  of  his  own  ship  as  despe 
rate,  and  that  unless  she  was  immediately  left  to  her  own  fate, 
both  vessels  would  inevitably  be  lost.  He,  therefore,  with  the 
generosity  natural  to  him,  repeatedly  requested  Captain  Ball  to 
let  him  loose  ;  and  on  Ball's  refusal  he  became  impetuous,  and 
enforced  his  demand  with  passionate  threats.  Ball  then  himself 
took  the  speaking-trumpet,  which  the  fury  of  the  wind  and  waves 
rendered  necessary,  and  with  great  solemnity  and  without  the 
least  disturbance  of  temper,  called  out  in  reply,  "  I  feel  confident 
that  I  can  bring  you  in  safe  ;  I  therefore  must  not,  and,  by  the 
help  of  Almighty  God  !  I  will  not  leave  you  !"  What  he  prom 
ised  he  performed  ;  and  after  they  were  safely  anchored,  Nelson 
came  on  board  of  Ball's  ship,  and  embracing  him  with  all  the  ar 
dor  of  acknowledgment,  exclaimed — "  a  friend  in  need  is  a  friend 
indeed  !"  At  this  time  and  on  this  occasion  commenced  that  firm 
and  perfect  friendship  between  these  two  great  men,  which  was 
interrupted  only  by  the  death  of  the  former.  The  pleasing  task 
of  dwelling  on  this  mutual  attachment  I  defer  to  that  part  of  the 
present  sketch  which  will  relate  to  Sir  Alexander  Ball's  opinions 
of  men  and  things.  It  will  be  sufficient  for  the  present  to  say, 
that  the  two  men,  whom  Lord  Nelson  especially  honored,  were 
Sir  Thomas  Troubridge  and  Sir  Alexander  Ball ;  and  once,  when 
they  were  both  present,  on  some  allusion  made  to  the  loss  of  his 
arm,  he  replied,  "Who  shall  dare  tell  me  that  I  want  an  arm, 
when  I  have  three  right  arms — this  (putting  forward  his  own 
left  one)  and  Ball  and  Troubridge  ?" 

In  the  plan  of  the  battle  of  the  Nile  it  was  Lord  Nelson's  de 
sign,  that  Captains  Troubridge  and  Ball  should  have  led  up  the 


ESSAY    IV.  493 

attack.  The  former  was  stranded  ;  and  the  latter,  by  accident 
of  the  wind,  could  not  bring  his  ship  into  the  line  of  battle  till 
some  time  after  the  engagement  had  become  general.  "With  his 
characteristic  forecast  and  activity  of  (what  may  not  improperly 
be  called)  practical  imagination,  he  had  made  arrangements  to 
meet  every  probable  contingency.  All  the  shrouds  and  sails  of 
the  ship,  not  absolutely  necessary  for  its  immediate  management, 
were  thoroughly  wetted  and  so  rolled  up,  that  they  were  as  hard 
and  as  little  inflammable  as  so  many  solid  cylinders  of  wood  ; 
every  sailor  had  his  appropriate  place  and  function,  and  a  certain 
number  were  appointed  as  the  firemen,  whose  sole  duty  it  was  to 
be  on  the  watch  if  any  part  of  the  vessel  should  take  fire  :  and 
to  these  men  exclusively  the  charge  of  extinguishing  it  was  com 
mitted.  It  was  already  dark  when  he  brought  his  ship  into  ac 
tion,  and  laid  her  along-side  the  French  _L'  Orient.  One  particu 
lar  only  I  shall  add  to  the  known  account  of  the  memorable  en 
gagement  between  these  ships,  and  this  I  received  from  Sir 
Alexander  Ball  himself.  He  had  previously  made  a  combustible 
preparation,  but  which,  from  the  nature  of  the  engagement  to  be 
expected,  he  had  purposed  to  reserve  for  the  last  emergency.  But 
jwst  at  the  time  when,  from  several  symptoms,  he  had  every 
reason  to  believe  that  the  enemy  would  soon  strike  to  him,  one 
of  the  lieutenants,  without  his  knowledge,  threw  in  the  combus 
tible  matter  ;  and  this  it  was  that  occasioned  the  tremendous  ex 
plosion  of  that  vessel,  which,  with  the  deep  silence  and  interrup 
tion  of  the  engagement  which  succeeded  to  it,  has  been  justly 
deemed  the  sublirnest  war  incident  recorded  in  history.  Yet  the 
incident  which  followed,  and  which  has  not,  I  believe,  been  pub 
licly  made  known,  is  scarcely  less  impressive,  though  its  sublimity 
is  of  a  different  character.  At  the  renewal  of  the  battle,  Cap 
tain  Ball,  though  his  ship  was  then  on  fire  in  three  different 
parts,  laid  her  along-side  a  French  eighty-four  ;  and  a  second 
longer  obstinate  contest  began.  The  firing  on  the  part  of  the 
French  ship  having  at  length  for  some  time  slackened,  and  then 
altogether  ceased,  and  yet  no  sign  given  of  surrender,  the  first 
lieutenant  came  to  Captain  Ball  and  informed,  him  that  the  hearts 
of  his  men  were  as  good  as  ever,  but  that  they  were  so  completely 
exhausted,  that  they  were  scarcely  capable  of  lifting  an  arm. 
He  asked,  therefore,  whether,  as  the  enemy  had  now  ceased  firing, 
the  men  might  be  permitted  to  lie  down  by  their  guns  for  a  short 


494  THIRD    LANDING-PLACE. 

time.  After  some  reflection,  Sir  Alexander  acceded  to  the  pro 
posal,  taking  of  course  the  proper  precautions  to  rouse  them  again 
at  the  moment  he  thought  requisite.  Accordingly,  with  the  ex 
ception  of  himself,  his  officers,  arid  the  appointed  watch,  the 
ship's  crew  lay  down,  each  in  the  place  to  which  he  was  stationed, 
and  slept  for  twenty  minutes.  They  were  then  roused  ;  and 
started  up,  as  Sir  Alexander  expressed  it,  more  like  men  out  of 
an  ambush  than  from  sleep,  so  co-instantaneously  did  they  all 
obey  the  summons  !  They  recommenced  their  fire,  and  in  a  few 
minutes  the  enemy  surrendered  ;  and  it  was  soon  after  discovered, 
that  during  that  interval,  and  almost  immediately  after  the  French 
ship  had  first  ceased  firing,  the  crew  had  sunk  down  by  their 
guns,  and  there  slept,  almost  by  the  side,  as  it  were,  of  their 
sleeping  enemy. 


ESSAY    V. 

Whose  powers  shed  round  him  in  the  common  strife 

Or  mild  concerns  of  ordinary  life 

A  constant  influence,  a  peculiar  grace  ; 

But  who  if  he  be  called  upon  to  face 

Some  awful  moment,  to  which  heaven  has  join'd 

Great  issues,  good  or  bad  for  human  kind, 

Is  happy  as  a  lover,  is  attired 

"With  sudden  brightness  like  a  man  inspired ; 

And  through  the  heat  of  conflict  keeps  the  law 

In  calmness  made,  and  sees  what  he  foresaw. 

WORDSWORTH.* 

AN  accessibility  to  the  sentiments  of  others  on  subjects  of  im 
portance  often  accompanies  feeble  minds,  yet  it  is  not  the  less  a 
true  arid  constituent  part  of  practical  greatness,  when  it  exists 
wholly  free  from  that  passiveness  to  impression  which  renders 
counsel  itself  injurious  to  certain  characters,  and  from  that  weak 
ness  of  heart  which,  in  the  literal  sense  of  the  word,  is  always 
craving  advice.  Exempt  from  all  such  imperfections,  say  rather 
in  perfect  harmony  with  the  excellencies  that  preclude  them,  this 
openness  to  the  influxes  of  good  sense  and  information,  from 
*  The  Christian  Warrior.— Ed. 


ESSAY    V.  495 

whatever  quarter  they  might  come,  equally  characterized  Lord 
Nelson  and  Sir  Alexander  Ball,  though  each  displayed  it  in  the 
way  hest  suited  to  his  natural  temper.  The  former  with  easy 
hand  collected,  as  it  passed  by  him,  whatever  could  add  to  his 
own  stores,  appropriated  what  he  could  assimilate,  and  levied 
subsidies  of  knowledge  from  all  the  accidents  of  social  life  arid 
familiar  intercourse.  Even  at  the  jovial  board,  and  in  the  height 
of  unrestrained  merriment,  a  casual  suggestion,  that  flashed  a 
new  light  on  his  mind,  changed  the  boon-companion  into  the  hero 
and  the  man  of  genius  ;  and  with  the  most  graceful  transition  he 
would  make  his  company  as  serious  as  himself.  When  the  taper 
of  his  genius  seemed  extinguished,  it  was  still  surrounded  by  an 
inflammable  atmosphere  of  its  own,  and  rekindled  at  the  first  ap 
proach  of  light,  and  not  seldom  at  a  distance  which  made  it  seem 
to  flame  up  self-revived.  In  Sir  Alexander  Ball,  the  same  excel 
lence  was  more  an  affair  of  system  :  and  he  would  listen  even  to 
weak  men,  with  a  patience,  which,  in  so  careful  an  economist  of 
time,  always  demanded  my  admiration,  and  not  seldom  excited 
my  wonderT  It  was  one  of  his  maxims,  thiffa  man  may  suggest 
what  he  can  not  give  :  adding,  that  a  wild  or  silly  plan  had 
more  than  once,  from  the  vivid  sense  and  distinct  perception  of 
its  folly,  occasioned  him  to  see  what  ought  to  be  done  in  a  new 
light,  or  with  a  clearer  insight.  There  is,  indeed,  a  hopeless 
sterility,  a  mere  negation  of  sense  and  thought,  which,  suggesting 
neither  difference  nor  contrast,  can  not  even  furnish  hints  for 
recollection.  But  on  the  other  hand,  there  are  minds  so  whim 
sically  constituted,  that  they  may  sometimes  be  profitably  inter 
preted  by  contraries,  a  process  of  which  the  great  T,jjpho  Brahe 
is  said  to  have  availed  himself  in  the  case  of  the  little  lackwit, 
who  used  to  sit  and  mutter  at  his  feet  while  he  was  studying. 
A  mind  of  this  sort  we  may  compare  to  a  magnetic  needle,  the 
poles  of  which  had  been  suddenly  reversed  by  a  flash  of  lightning, 
or  other  more  obscure  accident  of  nature.  It  may  be  safely  con 
cluded,  that  to  those  whose  judgment  or  information  he  respected, 
Sir  Alexander  Ball  did  not  content  nimself  with  giving  access  and 
attention.  No  !  he  seldom  failed  of  consulting  them  whenever 
the  subject  permitted  any  disclosure  ;  and  where  secrecy  was 
necessary,  he  well  knew  how  to  acquire  their  opinion  without  ex 
citing  even  a  conjecture  concerning  his  immediate  object. 

Yet,  with  all  this  readiness  of  attention,  and  with  all  this  zeal 


496  THIRD    LANDING-PLACE. 

in  collecting  the  sentiments  of  the  well-informed,  never  was  a 
man  more  completely  uninfluenced  by  authority  than  Sir  Alex 
ander  Ball,  never  one  who  sought  less  to  tranquillize  his  own 
doubts  by  the  mere  suffrage  and  coincidence  of  others.  The 
ablest  suggestions  had  no  conclusive  weight  with  him,  till  he  had 
abstracted  the  opinion  from  its  author,  till  he  had  reduced  it  into 
a  part  of  his  own  mind.  The  thoughts  of  others  were  always 
acceptable,  as  affording  him  at  least  a  chance  of  adding  to  his 
materials  for  reflection  ;  but  they  never  directed  his  judgment, 
much  less  superseded  it.  He  even  made  a  point  of  guarding 
against  additional  confidence  in  the  suggestions  of  his  'own  mind, 
from  finding  that  a  person  of  talents  had  formed  the  same  con 
viction,  unless  the  person,  at  the  same  time,  furnished  some  new 
argument,  or  had  arrived  at  the  same  conclusion  by  a  different 
road.  On  the  latter  circumstance  he  set  an  especial  value  and, 
I  may  almost  say,  courted  the  company  and  conversation  of  those, 
whose  pursuits  had  least  resembled  his  own,  if  he  thought  them 
men  of  clear  and  comprehensive  faculties.  During  the  period  of 
our  intimacy,  scarcely  a  week  passed,  in  which  he  dio1  not  desire 
me  to  think  on  some  particular  subject,  and  to  give  him  the  re 
sult  in  writing.  Most  frequently  by  the  time  I  had  fulfilled  his 
request,  he  v/ould  have  written  down  his  own  thoughts,  and  then, 
with  the  true  simplicity  of  a  great  mind,  as  free  from  ostentation 
as  it  was  above  jealousy,  he  would  collate  the  two  papers  in  my 
presence,  and  never  expressed  more  pleasure  than  in  the  few  in 
stances,  in  which  I  had  happened  to  light  on  all  the  arguments 
and  points  of  view  which  had  occurred  to  himself,  with  some  ad 
ditional  masons  which  had  escaped  him.  A  single  new  argu 
ment  delighted  him  more  than  the  most  perfect  coincidence,  un 
less,  as  before  stated,  the  train  of  thought  had  been  very  different 
from  his  own,  and  yet  just  and  logical.  He  had  one  quality  of 
mind,  which  I  have  heard  attributed  to  the  late  Mr.  Fox,  that 
of  deriving  a  keen  pleasure  from  clear  and  powerful  reasoning 
for  its  own  sake,  a  quality  iiW;he  intellect  which  is  nearly  con 
nected  with  veracity  and  a»love  of  justice  in  the  moral  character.* 

*  It  may  not  be  amiss  to  add,  that  tlie  pleasure  from  the  perception  of 
truth  "was  so  well  poised  and  regulated  by  the  equal  or  greater  delight  in 
utility,  that  his  love  of  real  accuracy  was  accompanied  with  a  proportionate 
dislike  of  that  hollow  appearance  of  it,  which  may  be  produced  by  turns  of 
phrase,  words  placed  in  balanced  antithesis,  and  those  epigrammatic  points 


ESSAY    V.  49V 

Valuing  in  others  merits  which  he  himself  possessed,  Sir  Alex- 
der  Ball  felt  no  jealous  apprehension  of  great  talent.  Unlike 
those  vulgar  functionaries,  whose  place  is  too  big  for  them,  a 
truth  which  they  attempt  to  disguise  from  themselves,  and  yet 
feel,  he  was  under  no  necessity  of  arming  himself  against  the  nat 
ural  superiority  of  genius  by  factitious  contempt  and  an  indus 
trious  association  of  extravagance  arid  impracticability  with  every 
deviation  from  the  ordinary  routine  ;  as  the  geographers  in  the 
middle  ages  used  to  designate,  on  their  meagre  maps,  the  greater 
part  of  the  world,  as  deserts  or  wildernesses  inhabited  by  griffins 
and  chimseras.  Competent  to  weigh  each  system  or  project  by 
its  own  arguments,  he  did  not  need  these  preventive  charms  and 
cautionary  amulets  against  delusion.  He  endeavored  to  make 
talent  instrumental  to  his  purposes  in  whatever  shape  it  ap 
peared,  and  with  whatever  imperfections  it  might  be  accompa 
nied  ;  but  wherever  talent  was  blended  with  moral  worth,  he 
sought  it  out,  loved  and  cherished  it.  If  it  had  pleased  Provi 
dence  to  preserve  his  life,  and  to  place  him  on  the  same  course 
on  which  Nelson  ran  his  race  of  glory,  there  are  two  points  in 
which  Sir  Alexander  Ball  would  most  closely  have  resembled  his 
illustrious  friend.  The  first  is,  that  in  his  enterprises  and  en 
gagements  he  would  have  thought  nothing  done,  till  all  had 
been  done  that  was  possible  : 

-A~/7  action  reputans,  si  quid  supcressct  agendum. 

The  second,  that  he  would  have  called  forth  all  the  talent  and 
virtue  that  existed  within  his  sphere  of  influence,  and  created  a 
band  of  heroes,  a  gradation  of  officers,  strong  in  head  and  strong 
in  heart,  worthy  to  have  been  his  companions  and  his  successors 
in  fame  and  public  usefulness. 

Never  was  greater  discernment  shown  in  the  selection  of  a  fit 

that  pass  for  subtle  and  luminous  distinctions  with  ordinary  readers,  but 
are  most  commonly  translatable  into  mere  truisms  or  trivialities,  if  indeed 
they  contain  any  meaning  at  all.  Having  observed  in  some  casual  conver 
sation,  that  though  there  were  doubtless  masses  of  matter  unorganized,  I 
saw  no  ground  for  asserting  a  mass  of  unorganized  matter  ;  Sir  A.  B. 
paused,  and  then  said  to  me,  with  that  frankness  of  manner  which  made  his 
very  rebukes  gratifying,  "  The  distinction  is  just,  and,  now  I  understand 
you,  abundantly  obvious ;  but  hardly  worth  the  trouble  of  your  inventing  9 
puzzle  of  words  to  make  it  appear  otherwise."  I  trust  the  rebuke  was  not 
lost  on  me. 


498  THIRD    LANDING-PLACE. 

agent,  than  when  Sir  Alexander  Ball  was  stationed  o/F  the  coast 
of  Malta  to  intercept  the  supplies  destined  for  the  French  garri 
son,  and  to  watch  the  movements  of  the  French  commanders, 
and  those  of  the  inhabitants  who  had  been  so   basely  betrayed 
into  their  power.      Encouraged  by  the  well-timed  promises  of  the 
English  captain,  the  Maltese   rose  through  all  their  casals  (or 
country  towns)  and  themselves  commenced  the  work  of  their 
emancipation,  by  storming  the  citadel  at  Citta  Vecchia,  the  an 
cient  metropolis  of  Malta,  and  the  central  height  of  the  island. 
Without  discipline,  without  a  military  leader,  and  almost  with 
out   arms,  these    brave    peasants  succeeded,   and  destroyed  the 
French  garrison  by  throwing  them  over  the  battlements  into  the 
trench  of  the  citadel.     In  the  course  of  this  blockade,  and  of  the 
tedious  siege  of  Yaletta,  Sir  Alexander  Ball  displayed  all  that 
strength  of  character,  that  variety  and  versatility  of  talent,  and 
that  sagacity,  derived  in  part  from  habitual  circumspection,  but 
which,  when  the  occasion  demanded  it,  appeared  intuitive  and 
like  an  instinct ;  at  the  union  of  which,  in  the  same  man,  one  of 
our  oldest  naval  commanders  once  told  me,  "  he  could  never  ex 
haust  his  wonder."     The  citizens  of  Yaletta  were  fond  of  relat 
ing  their  astonishment,  arid  that  of  the  French,  at  Captain  Ball's 
ship  wintering  at  anchor  out  of  the  reach  of  the  guns,  in  a  depth 
of  fathom  unexampled,  on  the  assured  impracticability  of  which 
the  garrison  had  rested  their  main  hope  of  regular  supplies.    Nor 
can  I  forget,  or  remember,  without  some  portion  of  my  original 
feeling,  the  solemn  enthusiasm  with  which  a  venerable  old  man, 
belonging  to  one  of  the  distant  casals,  showed  me  the  sea  coomb, 
where  their  father  Ball  (for  so  they  commonly  called  him),  first 
landed  ;  and  afterwards  pointed  out  the  very  place,  on  which  he 
first  stepped  on  their  island,  while  the  countenances  of  his  town's- 
men,  who  accompanied   him,   gave   lively  proofs  that  the  old 
"man's  enthusiasm  was  the  representative  of  the  common  feeling. 
There  is  no  reason  to  suppose,  that  Sir  Alexander  Ball  was 
at  any  time  chargeable  with  that  weakness  so  frequent  in  Eng 
lishmen,  and  so  injurious  to  our  interests  abroad,  of  despising  the 
inhabitants  of  other  countries,  of  losing  all  their  good  qualities 
in  their  vices,  of  making  no  allowance  for  those  vices,  from  their 
religious  or  political  impediments,  and  still  more  of  mistaking 
for  vices  a  mere  difference  of  manners  and  customs.     But  if  ever 
he  had  any  of  this  erroneous  feeling,  he  completely  freed  himself 


ESSAY    V.  499 

from  it  by  living1  among  the  Maltese  during  their  arduous  trials, 
as  long  as  the  French  continued  masters  of  the  capital.     He  wit 
nessed  their  virtues,  and  learned  to  understand  in  what  various 
shapes  and  even  disguises  the  valuable  parts  of  human  nature 
may  exist.     In  many  individuals,  whose  littleness  and  meanness 
in  the  common  intercourse  of  life  would  have  stamped  them  at 
once  as  contemptible  and  worthless  with  ordinary  Englishmen, 
he  had  found  such  virtues  of  disinterested  patriotism,  fortitude, 
and  self-denial,  as  would  have  done  honor  to  an  ancient  Roman. 
There   exists   in  England  a  gentlemanly  character,  a  gentle 
manly  feeling-,  very  different  even  from  that  which  is  the  most 
like  it,  the  character  of  a  well-born  Spaniard,  and  unexampled  in 
the  rest  of  Europe.    .This  feeling  probably  originated  in  the  for 
tunate  circumstance,  that  the  titles  of  our  English  nobility  fol 
low  the  law  of  their  property,   and  are  inherited  by  the  eldest 
sons  only.     From  this  source,  under  the  influences  of  our  constitu 
tion  and  of  our  astonishing  trade,  it  has  diffused  itself  in  different 
modifications  through  the  whole  country.      The  uniformity  of  our 
dress  amonsf  all  classes  above  that  of  the  day-laborer,  while  it 
has  authorized  all  classes  to  assume  the  appearance  of  a  gentle 
man,  has  at  the  same  time  inspired  the  wish  to  conform  their 
manners,  and  still  more  their  ordinary  actions  in.  social  intercourse, 
to  their  notions  of  the  gentlemanly,  the  most  commonly  received 
attribute  of  which  character  is  a  certain  generosity  in  trifles.    On 
the  other  hand,  the  encroachments  of  the  lower  classes  on  the. 
higher,  occasioned  and  favored  by  this  resemblance  in  exteriors, 
by  this  absence  of  any  cognizable  marks  of  distinction,  have  ren 
dered  each  class  more  reserved  and  jealous  in  their  general  com 
munion,  and  far  more  than  our  climate,  or  natural  temper,  have 
caused  that  haughtiness  and  reserve  in  our  outward  demeanor, 
which  is  so  generally  complained  of  among  foreigners.     Far  be 
it  from  me  to  depreciate  the  value  of  this  gentlemanly  feeling  ; 
I  respect  it  in  all  its  forms  and  varieties,  from  the  House  of  Com 
mons  to  the  gentlemen  in  the  one  shilling  gallery.     It  is  always 
the  ornament  of  virtue,  and  oftentimes  a  support  ;  but  it  is  a 
wretched  substitute  for  it.     Its  worth,  as  a  moral  good,  is  by  no 
means  in  proportion  to  its  value,  as  a  social  advantage.     These 
observations  are  not  irrelevant  :  for  to  the  want  of  reflection,  that 
this  diffusion,  of  gentlemanly  feeling  among  us  is  not  the  growth 
of  our  moral  excellence,  but  the  effect  of  various  accidental  ad- 


500  THIRD    LANDING-PLACE. 

vantages  peculiar  to  England  ;  to  our  not  considering  that  it  is 
unreasonable  and  uncharitable  to  expect  the  same  consequences, 
where  the  same  causes  have  not  existed  to  produce  them  ;  and, 
lastly,  to  our  proneness  to  regard  the  absence  of  this  character 
(which,  as  I  have  before  said,  does,  for  the  greater  part,  and,  in 
the  common  apprehension,  consist  in  a  certain  frankness  and  gen 
erosity  in  the  detail  of  action)  as  decisive  against  the  sum  total 
of  personal  or  national  worth  ;  we  must,  I  am  convinced,  at 
tribute  a  large  portion  of  that  conduct,  which  in  many  instances 
has  left  the  inhabitants'  of  countries  conquered  or  appropriated 
by  Great  Britain,  doubtful  whether  the  various  solid  advantages 
which  they  derived  from  our  protection  and  just  government  were 
not  bought  dearly  by  the  wounds  inflicted  on  their  feelings  and 
prejudices,  by  the  contemptuous  and  insolent  demeanor  of  the 
English  as  individuals.  The  reader  who  bears  this  remark  in 
mind,  will  meet,  in  the  course  of  this  narrative,  more  than  one 
passage  that  will  serve  as  its  comment  and  illustration. 

It  was,  I  know,  a  general  opinion  among  the  English  in  the 
Mediterranean,  that  Sir  Alexander  Ball  thought  too  well  of  the 
Maltese,  and  did  not  share  in  the  enthusiasm  of  Britons  concern 
ing  their  own  superiority.  To  the  former  part  of  the  charge,  I 
shall  only  reply  at  present,  that  a  more  venial  and  almost  desir 
able  fault  could  scarcely  be  attributed  to  a  governor,  than  that  of 
a  strong  attachment  to  the  people  whom  he  was  sent  to  govern 
The  latter  part  of  the  charge  is^false,  if  we  are  to  understand  by 
it,  that  he  did  not  think  his  countrymen  superior  on  the  whole  to 
the  other  nations  of  Europe  ;  but  it  is  tme,  as  far  as  relates,  to 
his  belief,  that  the  English  thought  themselves  still  better  than 
they  are  ;  that  they  dwelt  on,  and  exaggerated  their  national 
virtues,  and  weighed  them  by  the  opposite  vices  of  foreigners,  in 
stead  of  the  virtues  which  those  foreigners  possessed,  and  they 
themselves  wanted.  Above  all,  as  statesmen,  we  must  consider 
qualities  by  their  practical  uses.  Thus  he  entertained  no  doubt 
that  the  English  were  superior  to  all  others  in  the  kind  and  the 
degree  of  their  courage,  which  is  marked  by  far  greater  enthu 
siasm  than  the  courage  of  the  Germans  and  northern  nations,  and 
by  a  far  greater  steadiness  and  self-subsistency  than  that  of  the 
French.  It  is  more  closely  connected  with  the  character  of  the 
individual.  The  courage  of  an  English  army  (he  used  to  say)  is 
the  sum  total  of  the  courage  which  the  individual  soldiers  bring 


ESSAY    V.  501 

with. them  to  it,  rather  than  of  that  which  they  derive  from  it. 
This  remark  of  Sir  Alexander's  was  forcibly  recalled  to  my  mind 
when  I  was  at  Naples.  A  Russian  and  an  English  regiment 
were  drawn  up  together  in  the  same  square  : — "  See,"  said  a 
Neapolitan  to  me,  who  had  mistaken  me  for  one  of  his  country 
men,  "  there  is  but  one  face  in  that  whole  regiment,  while  in 
that"  (pointing  to  the  English)  "  every  soldier  has  a  face  of  his 
own."  On  the  other  hand,  there  are  qualities  scarcely  less  re 
quisite  to  the  completion  of  the  military  character,  in  which  Sir 
A.  did  not  hesitate  to  think  the  English  inferior  to  the  conti 
nental  nations  ;  as  for  instance,  both  in  the  power  and  the  dis 
position  to  endure  privations  ;  in  the  friendly  temper  neces 
sary,  when  troops  of  different  nations  are  to  act  in  concert  ;  in 
their  obedience  to  the  regulations  of  their  commanding  officers, 
respecting  the  treatment  of  the  inhabitants  of  the  countries 
through  which  they  are  marching,  as  well  as  in  many  other 
points,  not  immediately  connected  with  their  conduct  in  the  field  ; 
and,  above  all,  in  sobriety  and  temperance.  During  the  siege  of 
Valetta,  especially  during  the  sore  distress  to  which  the  besiegers 
were  for  some  time  exposed  from  the  failure  of  provision,  Sir 
Alexander  Ball  had  an  ample  opportunity  of  observing  and  weigh 
ing  the  separate  merits  and  demerits  of  the  native  and  of  the 
English  troops  ;  and  surely  since  the  publication  of  Sir  John 
Moore's  campaign,  there  can  be  no  just  oflence  taken,  though  I 
should  say,  that  before  the  walls  of  Valetta,  as  well  as  in  the 
plains  of  Galicia,  an  indignant  commander  might,  with  too  great 
propriety,  have  addressed  the  English  soldiery  in  the  words  of  an 
old  dramatist — 

Will  you  still  owe  your  virtues  to  youi'  bellies  ? 
And  only  then  think  nobly  when  y'are  full  ? 
Doth  fodder  keep  you  honest  ?     Are  you  bad 
When  out  of  flesh  ?     And  think  you't  an  excuse 
Of  vile  and  ignominious  actions,  that 
Y'are  lean  and  out  of  liking  ?* 

From  the  first  insurrectionary  movement  to  the  final  departure 
of  the  French  from  the  island,  though  the  civil  and  military 
powers  and  the  whole  of  the  island,  save  Valetta,  were  in  the 
hands  of  the  peasantry,  not  a  single  act  of  excess  can  be  charged 
against  the  Maltese,  if  we  except  the  razing  of  one  house  at 
*  Cart-wright,  Love's  Convert,  act  i.  sc.  1. 


502  THIED    LANDING-PLACE. 

Cittct  Vecehia  belonging  to  a  notorious  and  abandoned  traitor, 
the  creature  and  hireling  of  the  French.  In  no  instance,  did 
they  injure,  insult,  or  plunder,  any  one  of  the  native  nobility,  or 
employ  even  the  appearance  of  force  toward  them,  except  in  the 
collection  of  the  lead  and  iron  from  their  houses  and  gardens,  in 
order  to  supply  themselves  with  bullets  :  and  this  very  appear 
ance  was  assumed  from  the  generous  wish  to  shelter  the  nobles 
from  the  resentment  of  the  French,  should  the  patriotic  efforts  of 
the  peasantry  prove  unsuccessful.  At  the  dire  command  of 
famine  the  Maltese' troops  did  indeed  once  force  their  way  to  the 
ovens,  in  which  the  bread  for  the  British  soldiery  was  baked,  and 
were  clamorous  that  an  equal  division  should  be  made.  I  men 
tion  this  unpleasant  circumstance,  because  it  brought  into  proof 
the  firmness  of  Sir  Alexander  Ball's  character,  his  presence  of 
mind,  and  generous  disregard  of  danger  and  personal  responsibili 
ty,  where  the  slavery  or  emancipation,  the  misery  or  the  happi 
ness,  of  an  innocent  and  patriotic  people  were  involved  ;  and  be 
cause  his  conduct  in  this  exigency  evinced  that  his  general  habits 
of  circumspection  and  deliberation  were  the  results  of  wisdom  and 
complete  self-possession,  and  not  the  easy  virtues  of  a  spirit  con 
stitutionally  timorous  and  hesitating.  He  was  sitting  at  a  table 
with  the  principal  British  officers,  when  a  certain  general  ad 
dressed  him  in  strong  and  violent  terms  concerning  this  outrage 
of  the  Maltese,  reminding  him  of  the  necessity  of  exerting  his 
commanding  influence  in  the  present  case,  or  the  consequences 
must  be  taken.  "What,"  replied  Sir  Alexander  Ball,  "would 
you  have  us  do  ?  Would  you  have  us  threaten  death  to  men 
dying  with  famine  ?  Can  you  suppose  that  the  hazard  of  being 
shot  will  weigh  with  whole  regiments  acting  under  a  common 
necessity  ?  Does  not  the  extremity  of  hunger  take  away  all 
difference  between  men  and  animals  ?  and  is  it  not  as  absurd  to 
appeal  to  the  prudence  of  a  body  of  men  starving,  as  to  a  herd  of 
famished  wolves  ?  No,  general,  I  will  not  degrade  myself  or 
outrage  humanity  by  menacing  famine  with  massacre  !  More 
effectual  means  must  be  taken."  With  these  words  he  rose  and 
left  the  room,  and  having  first  consulted  with  Sir  Thomas  Trou- 
bridge,  he  determined  at  his  own  risk  on  a  step,  which  the  ex 
treme  necessity  warranted,  and  which  the  conduct  of  the  IvTeapoli- 
tan  court  amply  justified.  For  this  court,  though  terror-striken 
by  the  French,  was  still  actuated  by  hatred  to  the  English  and  a 


ESSAY    V.  503 

jealousy  of  tlieir  power  in  the  Mediterranean  ;  and  this  in  so 
strange  and  senseless  a  manner,  that  we  must  join  the  extremes 
of  imbecility  and  treachery  in  the  same  cabinet,  in  order  to  find 
it  comprehensible.*  'Though  the  very  existence  of  Naples  and 
Sicily,  as  a  nation,  depended  wholly  and  exclusively  on  British 
support ;  though  the  royal  family  owed  their  personal  safety  to 
the  British  fleet  ;  though  not  only  their  dominions  and  their  rank, 
but  the  liberty  and  even  the  lives  of  Ferdinand  and  his  family, 
were  interwoven  Avith  our  success  :  yet  with  an  infatuation 
scarcely  credible,  the  most  affecting  representations  of  the  distress 
of  the  besiegers,  and  of  the  utter  insecurity  of  Sicily  if  the  French 
remained  possessors  of  Malta,  were  treated  with  neglect  ;  and  ur 
gent  remonstrances  for  the  permission  of  importing  corn  from 
Messina  were .  answered  only  by  sanguinary  edicts  precluding  all 
supply.  Sir  Alexander  Ball  sent  for  his  first  lieutenant,  and  gave 
him  orders  to  proceed  immediately  to  the  port  of  Messina,  and 
there  to  seize  and  bring  with  him  to  Malta  the  ships  laden  with 
corn,  of  the  number  of  which  Sir  Alexander  had  received  accu 
rate  information.  These  orders  were  executed  without  delay,  to 
the  great  delight  and  profit  of  the  ship  owners  and  proprietors  ; 
the  necessity  of  raising  the  siege  was  removed  ;  and  the  author 
of  the  measure  waited  in  calmness  for  the  consequences  that 
might  result  to  himself  personally.  But  not  a  complaint,  not  a 
murmur,  proceeded  from  the  court  of  Naples.  The  sole  result 
was,  that  the  governor  of  Malta  became  an  especial  object  of  its 
hatred,  its  fear,-  and  its  respect. 

The  whole  of  this  tedious  siege,  from  its  commencement  to  the 

*  It  can  not  he  doubted,  that  the  sovereign  himself  was  kept  in  a  state 
of  delusion.  Both  his  understanding  and  his  moral  principles  are  far  better 
than  could  reasonably  be  expected  from  the  infamous  mode  of  his  education : 
if  indeed  the  systematic  preclusion  of  all  knowlndge,  and  the  unrestrained 
indulgence  of  his  passions,  adopted  by  the  Spanish  court  for  the  purposes 
of  preserving  him  dependent,  can  be  called  by  the  name  of  education.  Of 
the  other  influenciug  persons  in  the  Neapolitan  government,  Mr.  Lcckie  has 
given  us  a  true  and  lively  account.  It  will  be  greatly  to  the  advantage  of 
the  present  narrative,  if  the  reader  should  have  previously  perused  Mr. 
Lcckie's  pamphlet  on  the  state  of  Sicily :  the  facts  which  I  shall  have  oc 
casion  to  mention  hereafter  will  reciprocally  confirm  and  be  confirmed  by 
the  documents  furnished  in  that  most  interesting  work ;  in  which  I  see  but 
one  blemish  of  importance,  namely,  that  the  author  appears  too  frequently 
to  consider  justice  and  true  policy  as  capable  of  being  contradistinguished. 


504  THIRD    LANDING-PLACE. 

signing  of  the  capitulation,  called  forth  into  constant  activity  the 
rarest  and  most  difficult  virtues  of  a  commanding-  mind  ;  virtues 
of  no  show  or  splendor  in  the  vulgar  apprehension,  yet  more  in 
fallible  characteristics  of  true  greatness  than  the  most  unequivo 
cal  displays  of  enterprise  and  active  daring.  Scarcely  a  day 
passed,  in  which  Sir  Alexander  Ball's  patience,  forbearance,  and 
inflexible  constancy,  were  not  put  to  the  severest  trial.  He  had 
not  only  to  remove  the  misunderstandings  that  arose  between  the 
Maltese  and  their  allies,  to  settle  the  differences  among  the  Mal 
tese  themselves,  and  to  organize  their  efforts  :"  he  was  likewise 
engaged  in  the  more  difficult  and  unthankful  task  of  counteract 
ing  the  weariness,  discontent,  and  despondency,  of  his  own  coun 
trymen  ; — a  task,  however,  which  he  accomplished  by  manage 
ment  and  address,  and  an  alternation  of  real  firmness  with  appa 
rent  yielding.  During  many  months  he  remained  the  only 
Englishman  who  did  not  think  the  siege  hopeless,  and  the  object 
worthless.  He  often  spoke  of  the  time  in  which  he  resided  at 
the  country  seat  of  the  grand  master  at  St.  Antonio,  four  miles 
from  Valetta,  as  perhaps  the  most  trying  period  of  his  life.  For 
some  wreeks  Captain  Vivian  was  his  sole  English  companion,  of 
whom,  as  his  partner  in  anxiety,  he  always  expressed  himself 
with  affectionate  esteem.  £ir  Alexander  Ball's  presence  was  ab 
solutely  necessary  to  the  Maltese,  who,  accustomed  to  be  gov 
erned  by  him,  became  incapable  of  acting  in  concert  without  his 
immediate  influence.  In  the  outburst  of  popular  emotion,  the 
impulse,  which  produces  an  insurrection,  is  for  a  brief  while  its 
sufficient  pilot ;  the  attraction  constitutes  the  cohesion,  and  the 
common  provocation,  supplying  an  immediate  object,  not  only 
unites,  but  directs,  the  multitude.  But  this  first  impulse  had 
passed  away,  and  Sir  Alexander  Ball  was  the  one  individual  who 
possessed  the  general  confidence.  On  him  they  relied  with  im 
plicit  faith  :  and  even  after  they  had  long  enjoyed  the  blessings 
of  British  government  and  protection,  it  was  still  remarkable 
with  what  childlike  helplessness  they  were  in  the  habit  of  apply 
ing  to  him,  even  in  their  private  concerns.  It  seemed  as  if  they 
thought  him  made  on  purpose  to  think  for  them  all.  Yet  his  sit 
uation  at  St.  Antonio  was  one  of  great  peril :  and  he  attributed 
his  preservation  to  the  dejection,  which  had  now  begun  to  prey 
on  the  spirits  of  the  French  garrison,  and  which  rendered  them 
unenterprising  and  almost  passive,  aided  by  the  dread  which  the 


ESSAY    V.  505 

nature  of  the  country  inspired.  For  subdivided  as  it  was  into 
small  fields,  scarcely  larger  than4fci  cottage-garden,  and  each  of 
these  little  squares  of  land  inclosed  with  substantial  stone  walls  ; 
these  too  from  the  necessity  of  having  the  fields  perfectly  level, 
rising  in  tiers  above  each  other ;  the  whole  of  the  inhabited  part 
of  the  island  was  an  effective  fortification  for  all  the  purposes  of 
annoyance  and  offensive  warfare.  Sir  Alexander  Ball  exerted 
himself  successfully  in  procuring  information  respecting  the  state 
and  temper  of  the  garrison,  and  by  the  assistance  of  the  clergy 
and  the  almost  universal  fidelity  of  the  Maltese,  contrived  that 
the  spies  in  the  pay  of  the  French  should  be  in  truth  his  own 
most  confidential  agents.  He  had  already  given  splendid  proofs 
that  he  could  outfight  them  ;  but  here,  and  in  his  after  diplo 
matic  intercourse  previously  to  the  recommencement  of  the  war, 
he  likewise  out-witted  them.  He  once  told  me  with  a  smile,  as 
we  were  conversing  on  the  practice  of  laying  wagers,  that  he 
was  sometimes  inclined  to  think  that  the  final  perseverance  in 
the  siege  was  not  a  little  due  to  several  valuable  bets  of  his  own, 
he  well  knowing  at  the  time,  and  from  information  which  him 
self  alone  possessed,  that  he  should  certainly  lose  them.  Yet  this 
artifice  had  a  considerable  effect  in  suspending  the  impatience  of 
the  officers,  and  in  supplying  topics  for  dispute  and  conversation. 
At  length,  however,  the  two  French  frigates,  the  sailing  of  which 
had  been  the  subject  of  these  wagers,  left  the  great  harbor  on 
the  24th  of  August,  1800,  with  a  part  of  the  garrison ;  and  one 
of  them  soon  became  a  prize  to  the  English.  Sir  Alexander  Ball 
related  to  me  the  circumstances  which  occasioned  the  escape  of 
the  other  ;  but  I  do  not  recollect  them  with  sufficient  accuracy 
to  dare  repeat  them  in  this  place.  On  the  15th  of  September 
following,  the  capitulation  was  signed,  and  after  a  blockade  of 
two  years  the  English  obtained  possession  of  Valetta,  and  re 
mained  masters  of  the  whole  island  and  its  dependencies. 

Anxious  not  to  give  offence,  but  more  anxious  to  communicate 
the  truth,  it  is  not  without  pain  that  I  find  myself  under  the 
moral  obligation  of  remonstrating  against  the  silence  concerning 
Sir  Alexander  Ball's  services  or  the  transfer  of  them  to  others. 
More  than  once  has  the  latter  roused  my  indignation  in  the  re 
ported  speeches  of  the  House  of  Commons  ;  and  as  to  the  former, 
I  need  only  state  that  in  Rees's  Encyclopaedia  there  is  an  histor 
ical  article  of  considerable  length  under  the  word  Malta,  in  which 

VOL.  n.  Y 


506  THIRD    LANDING-PLACE, 

Sir  Alexander's  name  does  not  once  occur  !  During"  a  residence 
of  eighteen  months  in  that  island,  I  possessed  and  availed  myself 
of  the  best  possible  means  of  information,  not  only. from  eye-wit 
nesses,  but  likewise  from  the  principal  agents  themselves.  And 
I  now  thus  publicly  and  unequivocally  assert,  that  to  Sir  A.  Ball 
pre-eminently — and  if  I  had  said,  to  Sir  A.  Ball  alone,  the  ordi 
nary  use  of  the  word  under  such  circumstances  would  bear  me 
out — the  capture  and  the  preservation  of  Malta  were  owing,  with 
every  blessing  that  a  powerful  rnind  and  a  wise  heart  could  con 
fer  on  its  docile  and  grateful  inhabitants.  With  a  similar  pain  I 
proceed  to  avow  my  sentiments  on  this  capitulation,  by  which 
Malta  was  delivered  up  to  his  Britannic  Majesty  and  his  allies, 
without  the  least  mention  made  of  the  Maltese.  With  a  warmth 
honorable  both  to  his  head  and  his  heart,  Sir  Alexander  Ball 
pleaded,  as  not  less  a  point  of  sound  policy  than  of  plain  justice, 
that  the  Maltese,  by  some  representative,  should  be  made  a  party 
in  the  capitulation,  and  a  joint  subscriber  in  the  signature.  They 
had  never  been  the  slaves  or  the  property  of  the  Knights  of  St. 
John,  but  freemen  and  the  true  landed  proprietors  of  the  country, 
the  civil  and  military  government  of  which,  under  certain  restric 
tions,  had  been  vested  in  that  order ,  yet  checked  by  the  rights 
and  influences  of  the  clergy  and  the  native  nobility,  and  by  the 
customs  and  ancient  laws  of  the  island.  This  trust  the  Knights 
had,  with  the  blackest  treason  and  the  most  profligate  perjury, 
betrayed  and  abandoned.  The  right  of  government  of  course  re 
verted  to  the  landed  proprietors  and  the  clergy.  Animated  by 
a  just  sense  of  this  right,  the  Maltese  had  risen  of  their  own  ac 
cord,  had  contended  for  it  in  defiance  of  death  and  danger,  had 
fought  bravely,  and  endured  patiently.  Without  undervaluing 
the  military  assistance  afterwards  furnished  by  Great  Britain 
(though  how  scanty  this  was  before  the  arrival  of  General  Pigot 
is  well  known),  it  remained  undeniable,  that  the  Maltese  had 
taken  the  greatest  share  both  in  the  fatigues  and  in  the  priva 
tions  consequent  on  the  siege  ;  and  that  had  not  the  greatest  vir 
tues  and  the  most  exemplary  fidelity  been  uniformly  displayed  by 
them,  the  English  troops  (they  not  being  more  numerous  than 
they  had  been  for  the  greater  part  of  the  two  years)  could  not 
possibly  have  remained  before  the  fortifications  of  Yaletta,  de 
fended  as  that  city  was  by  a  French  garrison  which  greatly  out 
numbered  the  British  besiegers.  Still  less  could  there  have  been 


ESSAY*  V.  507 

the  least  hope  of  ultimate  success ;  as  if  any  part  of  the  Maltese 
peasantry  had  been  friendly  to  the  French,  or  even  indifferent, 
if  they  had  not  all  indeed  been  most  zealous  and  persevering  in 
their  hostility  towards  them,  it  would  have  been  impracticable  so 
to  blockade  that  island  as  to  have  precluded  the  arrival  of  sup 
plies.  If  the  siege  had  proved  unsuccessful,  the  Maltese  were 
well  aware  that  they  should  be  exposed  to  all  the  horrors  which 
revenge  and  wounded  pride  could  dictate  to  an  unprincipled,  ra 
pacious,  and  sanguinary  soldiery  ;  and  now  that  success  had 
crowned  their  efforts,  was  this  to  be  their  reward,  that  their  own 
allies  were  to  bargain  for  them  with  the  French  as  for  a  herd  of 
slaves,  whom  the  French  had  before  purchased  from  a  former 
proprietor  ?  If  it  be  urged,  reasoned  Sir  A.  B.,  that  there  is  no 
established  government  in  Malta,  is  it  not  equally  true  that 
through  the  whole  population  of  the  island  there  is  not  a  single 
dissentient ; — and  thus  that  the  chief  inconvenience,  which  an 
established  authority  is  to  obviate,  is  virtually  removed  by  the 
admitted  fact  of  their  unanimity  ?  And  have  they  not  a  bishop 
and  a  dignified  clergy,  their  judges  and  municipal  magistrates, 
who  were  at  all  times  sharers  in  the  power  of  the  government, 
and  now,  supported  by  the  unanimous  suffrage  of  the  inhabitants, 
have  a  rightful  claim  to  be  considered  as  its  representatives  ? 
Will  it  not  be  oftener  said  than  answered,  that  the  main  differ 
ence  between  French  and  English  injustice  rests  in  this  point 
alone,  that  the  French  seized  on  the  ^Ealtese  without  any  previ 
ous  pretences  of  friendship,  while  the  English  procured  possession 
of  the  island  by  means  of  their  friendly  promises,  and  by  the  co 
operation  of  the  natives  afforded  in  confident  reliance  on  these 
promises  ?  The  impolicy  of  refusing  the  signature  on  the  part 
of  the  Maltese  was  equally  evident ;  since  such  refusal  could  an 
swer  no  one  purpose  but  that  of  alienating  their  affections  by  a 
wanton  insult  to  their  feelings.  For  the  Maltese  were  not  only 
ready  but  desirous  and  eager  to  place  themselves  at  the  same 
time  under  British  protection,  to  take  the  oath  of  loyalty  as  sub 
jects  of  the  British  crown,  and  to  acknowledge  their  island  to  be- 
long  to  it.  These  representations,  however,  were  overruled  :  and 
I  dare  affirm,  from  my  own  experience  in  the  Mediterranean,  that 
our  conduct  in  this  instance  aggravated  the  impression  which  had 
been  made  at  Corsica,  Minorca,  and  elsewhere,  and  was  often 
referred  to  by  men  of  reflection  in  Sicily,  who  have  more  than 


508  THIRD    LANDING-PLACE. 

once  said  to  me,  "  a  connection  with  Great  Britain,  with  the 
consequent  extension  and  security  of  our  commerce,  are  indeed 
great  blessings  :  but  who  can  rely  on  their  permanence  ;  or  that 
we  shall  not  be  made  to  pay  bitterly  for  our  zeal  as  partisans  of 
England,  whenever  it  shall  suit  its  plans  to  deliver  us  back  to 
our  old  oppressors  ? ' ' 


ESSAY  VI. 

The  way  of  ancient  ordnance,  though  it  winds, 

Is  yet  no  devious  way.     Straight  forward  goes 

The  lightning's  path  ;  and  straight  the  fearful  path 

Of  the  cannon-ball.     Direct  it  flies  and  rapid, 

Shattering  that  it  may  reach,  and  shattering  what  it  reaches 

My  son  !  the  road  the  human  being  travels, 

That,  on  which  blessing  comes  and  goes,  doth  follow 

The  river's  course,  the  valley's  playful  windings, 

Curves  round  the  corn-field  and  the  hill  of  vines, 

Honoring  the  holy  bounds  of  property  1 

There  exists 

A  higher  than  the  warrior's  excellence.  WALLENSTEIX.* 

CAPTAIN  BALL'S  services  in  Malta  were  honored  with  his 
sovereign's  approbation,  transmitted  in  a  letter  from  the  secretary 
Dundas,  and  with  a  baronetcy.  A  thousand  poundsf  were  at 

*  Part  I.  act  1.  sc.  4.— Ed. 

f  I  scarce  know  whether  it  be  worth  mentioning,  that  this  sum  remained 
undemanded  till  the  spring  of  the  year  1805  :  at  which  time,  during  an  ex 
amination  of  the  treasury  accounts,  I  observed  the  circumstance  and  noticed 
it  to  the  governor,  who  had  suffered  it  to  escape  altogether  from  his 
memory,  for  the  latter  years  at  least.  The  value  attached  to  the  present 
by  the  receiver,  must  have  depended  on  his  construction  of  its  purpose  and 
meaning  :  for,  in  a  pecuniary  point  of  view,  the  sum  was  not  a  moiety  of 
what  Sir  Alexander  had  expended  from  his  private  fortune  during  the 
blockade.  His  immediate  appointment  to  the  government  of  the  island,  so 
earnestly  prayed  for  by  the  Maltese,  would  doubtless  have  furnished  a  less 
questionable  proof  that  his  services  were  as  highly  estimated  by  the  min 
istry  as  they  were  graciously  accepted  by  his  sovereign.  But  this  was 
withholden  as  long  as  it  remained  possible  to  doubt,  whether  great  talents, 
joined  to  local  experience,  and  the  confidence  and  affection  of  the  inhabi- 


ESSAY    VI.  509 

the  same  time  directed  to  be  paid  him  from  the  Maltese  treasury. 
The  best  and  most  appropriate  addition  to  the  applause  of  his 
king  and  his  country,  Sir  Alexander  Ball  found  in  the  feelings 
and  faithful  affection  of  the  Maltese.  The  enthusiasm  manifest 
ed  in  reverential  gestures  and  shouts  of  triumph  whenever  their 
friend  and  deliverer  appeared  in  public,  was  the  utterance  of  a 
deep  feeling,  and  in  nowise  the  mere  ebullition  of  animal  sen 
sibility  ;  which  is  not  indeed  a  part  of  the  Maltese  character. 
The  truth  of  this  observation  will  not  be  doubted  by  any  person, 
who  has  witnessed  the  religious  processions  in  honor  of  the  fa 
vorite  saints,  both  at  Valetta  and  at  Messina  or  Palermo,  and 
who  must  have  been  struck  with  the  contrast  between  the  ap 
parent  apathy,  or  at  least  the  perfect  sobriety,  of  the  Maltese, 
and  the  fanatical  agitations  of  the  Sicilian  populace.  Among 
the  latter,  each  man's  soul  seems  hardly  containable  in  his  body, 
like  a  prisoner,  whose  jail  is  on  fire,  flying  madly  from  one  barred 
outlet  to  another  ;  while  the  former  might  suggest  the  suspicion, 
that  their  bodies  were  on  the  point  of  sinking  into  the  same 
slumber  with  their  understandings.  But  their  political  deliver 
ance  was  a  thing  that  came  nome  to  their  hearts,  and  intertwined 
itself  with  their  most  impassioned  recollections,  personal  and 
patriotic.  To  Sir  Alexander  Ball  exclusively  the  Maltese  them 
selves  attributed  their  emancipation  :  on  him  too  they  rested 
their  hopes  of  the  future.  Whenever  he  appeared  in  Valetta, 
the  passengers  on  each  side,  through  the  whole  length  of  the 
street,  stopped,  and  remained  uncovered  till  he  had  passed  :  the 
very  clamors  of  the  market-place  were  hushed  at  his  entrance, 
and  then  exchanged  for  shouts  of  joy  and  welcome.  Even  after 
the  lapse  of.  years  he  never  appeared  in  any  of  their  casals,* 
which  did  not  lie  in  the  direct  road  between  Valetta  and  St.  An 
tonio,  his  summer  residence,  but  the  women  and  children,  with 

tants,  might  not  be  dispensed  with  in  the  person  intrusted  with  that  gov 
ernment.  Crimen  ingrati  animi  quod  inagnis  ingeniis  hand  raro  objtcitur 
scvpius  nil  aliud  est  quarn  perspicacia  quondam  in  causam  beneficii  collati. 

*  It  was  the  governor's  custom  to  visit  every  casal  throughout  the  is 
land  once,  if  not  twice,  in  the  course  of  each  summer  ;  and  during  my  resi 
dence  there,  I  had  the  honor  of  being  his  constant,  and  most  often  his  only 
companion,  in  these  rides  ;  to  Vhich  I  owe  some  of  the  happiest  and  most 
instructive  hours  of  my  life.  In  the  poorest  Louse  of  the  most  distant 
casal  two  rude  paintings  were  sure  to  be  found :  a  picture  of  the  Virgin 
and  Child  ;  and  a  portrait  of  Sir  Alexander  Ball. 


610  THIRD    LANDING-PLACE. 

such  of  the  men  who  were  not  at  labor  in  their  fields,  fell  into 
ranks,  and  followed  or  preceded  him,  singing  the  Maltese  song 
which  had  been  made  in  his  honor,  and  which  was  scarcely  less 
familiar  to  the  inhabitants  of  Malta  and  Gozo,  than  God  save 
the  King  to  Britons.  W^Jicn  he  tcent  to  the  gate  through  the 
city,  the  young  men  refrained  talking  ;  and  the  aged  arose 
and  stood  up.  When  the  ear  heard,  then  it  blessed  him;  and 
when  the  eye  saw  him.,  it  gave  witness  to  him ;  because  he  de 
livered  the  poor  that  cried,  and  the  fatJierless,  and  those  tliat  had 
none  to  help  them.  The  blessing  of  them  that  ivcre  ready  to 
perish  came  upon  him ;  and  he  caused  the  ividow's  heart  to 
sing  for  joy. 

These  feelings  were  afterwards  amply  justified  by  his  admin 
istration  of  the  government  ;  and  the  very  excesses  of  their  grati 
tude  on  their  first  deliverance  proved,  in  the  end,  only  to  be  ac 
knowledgments  antedated.  For  some  time  after  the  departure 
of  the  French,  the  distress  was  so  general  and  so  severe,  that  a 
large  portion  of  the  lower  classes  became  mendicants,  and  one  of 
the  greatest  thoroughfares  of  Valetta  still  retains  the  name  of 
"  Nix  Mangiare  Stairs,"  from  the  crowd  who  used  there  to  as 
sail  the  ears  of  the  passengers  with  the  cries  of  "  nix  mangiare," 
or  "  nothing  to  eat,"  the  former  word  nix  being  the  low  German 
pronunciation  of  nichts,  nothing.  By  what  means  it  was  intro 
duced  into  Malta,  I  know  not  ;  but  it  became  the  common 
vehicle  both  of  solicitation  and  refusal,  the  Maltese  thinking  it  an 
English  word,  and  the  English  supposing  it  to  be  Maltese.  I 
often  felt  it  as  a  pleasing  remembrancer  of  the  evil  day  gone  by, 
when  a  tribe  of  little  children,  quite  naked,  as  is  the  custom  of 
that  climate,  and  each  with  a  pair  of  gold  ear-rings  in  its  ears, 
and  all  fat  and  beautifully  proportioned,  would  suddenly  leave 
their  play,  and,  looking  round  to  see  that  their  parents  were  not 
in  sight,  change  their  shouts  of  merriment  for  "nix  mangiare  /" 
awkwardly  imitating  the  plaintive  tones  of  mendicancy  ;  while 
the  white  teeth  in  their  little  swarthy  faces  gave  a  splendor  to 
the  happy  and  confessing  laugh,  with  which  they  received  the 
good-humored  rebuke  or  refusal,  and  ran  back  to  their  former 
sport. 

In  the  interim  between  the  capitulation  of  the  French  garri 
son  and  Sir  Alexander  Ball's  appointment  as  his  Majesty's  civil 
commissioner  for  Malta,  his  zeal  for  the  Maltese  was  neither  sus- 


ESSAY    VI.  511 

pendod,  nor  unproductive  of  important  benefits.  He  was  enabled 
to  remove  many  prejudices  and  misunderstandings  ;  and  to  per 
sons  of  no  inconsiderable  influence  gave  juster  notions  of  the 
true  importance  of  the  island  to  Great  Britain.  He  displayed 
the  magnitude  of  the  trade  of  the  Mediterranean  in  its  existing 
state  ;  showed  the  immense  extent  to  which  it  might  be  carried, 
and  the  hollowness  of  the  opinion,  that  this  trade  was  attached 
to  the  south  of  France  by  any  natural  or  indissoluble  bond  of 
connection.  I  have  some  reason  likewise  for  believing,  that  his 
wise  and  patriotic  representations  prevented  Malta  from  being 
made  the  seat  of,  and  pretext  for,  a  numerous  civil  establishment, 
in  hapless  imitation  of  Corsica,  Ceylon,  and  the  Cape  of  Good 
Hope.  It  was  at  least  generally  rumored,  that  it  had  been  in 
the  contemplation  of  the  ministry  to  appoint  Sir  Ralph  Aber- 
crombie  as  governor,  with  a  salary  of  £10,000  a  year,  and  to 
reside  in  England,  while  one  of  his  countrymen  was  to  be  the 
lieutenant-governor,  at  £5,000  a  year;  to  which  w,ere  to  be  ad 
ded  a  long  et  cetera  of  other  offices  and  places  of  proportional 
emolument.  This  threatened  appendix  to  the  state  calendar 
may  have  existed  only  in  the  imagination  of  the  reporters,  yet 
inspired  some  uneasy  apprehensions-  in  the  minds  of  many  well- 
wishers  to  the  Maltese,  who  knew  that — for  a  foreign  settlement 
at  least,  and  one  too  possessing  in  all  the  ranks  arid  functions  of 
society  an  ample  population  of  its  own — such  a  stately  and  wide- 
branching  tree  of  patronage,  though  delightful  to  the  individuals 
who  are  to  pluck  its  golden  apples,  sheds,  like  the  manchineel, 
imwholesome  and  corrosive  dews  on  the  multitude  who  are  to 
rest  beneath  its  shade.  It  need  not,  however,  be  doubted,  that 
Sir  Alexander  Ball  would  exert  himself  to  preclude  any  such  in 
tention,  by  stating  and  evincing  the  extreme  impolicy  and  injus 
tice  of  the  plan,  as  well  as  its  utter  inutility,  in  the  case  of 
Malta.  With  the  exception  of  the  governor  and  of  the  public 
secretary,  both  of  whom  undoubtedly  should  be  natives  of  Great 
Britain  and  appointed  by  the  British  government,  there  was  no 
civil  office  that  could  be  of  the  remotest  advantage  to  the  island 
which  was  not  already  filled  by  the  natives,  and  the  functions 
of  which  none  could  perform  so  well  as  they.  The  number  of 
inhabitants  (he  would  state)  was  prodigious  compared  with  the 
extent  of  the  island,  though  from  the  fear  of  the  Moors  one 
fourth  of  its  surface  remained  unpeopled  and  uncultivated.  To 


512  THIRD    LANDING-PLACE. 

deprive,  therefore,  the  middle  and  lower  classes  of  such  places  as 
they  had  heen  accustomed  to  hold,  would  be  cruel ;  while  the 
places  holden  by  the  nobility  were,  for  the  greater  part,  such  as 
none  but  natives  could  perform  the  duties  of.  By  any  innovation 
we  should  affront  the  higher  classes  and  alienate  the  affections 
of  all,  not  only  without  any  imaginable  advantage  but  with  the 
certainty  of  great  loss.  Were  Englishmen  to  be  employed,  the 
salaries  must  be  increased  four-fold,  and  would  yet  be  scarcely 
worth  acceptance  ;  and  in  higher  offices,  such  as  those  of  the 
civil  and  criminal  judges,  the  salaries  must  be  augmented  more 
than  ten-fold.  For,  greatly  to  the  credit  of  their  patriotism  and 
moral  character,  the  Maltese  gentry  sought  these  places  as  honor 
able  distinctions,  which  endeared  them  to  their  fellow-country 
men,  and  at  the  same  time  rendered  the  yoke  of  the  order  some 
what  less  grievous  and  galling.  "With  the  exception  of  the 
Maltese  secretary,  wrhose  situation  was  one  of  incessant  labor, 
and  who  at  the  same  time  performed  the  duties  of  law  counsellor 
to  the  government,  the  highest  salaries  scarcely  exceeded  <£lOG 
a  year,  and  were  barely  sufficient  to  defray  the  increased  ex 
penses  of  the  functionaries  for  an  additional  equipage,  or  one  of 
more  imposing  appearance.  Besides,  it  was  of  importance  that 
the  person  placed  at  the  head  of  that  government  should  be 
looked  up  to  by  the  natives,  and  possess  the  means  of  distinguish 
ing  and  rewarding  those  who  had  been  most  faithful  arid  zealous 
in  their  attachment  to  Great  Britain,  and  hostile  to  their  former 
tyrants.  The  number  of  the  employments  to  be  conferred  would 
give  considerable  influence  to  his  Majesty's  civil  representative, 
while  the  trifling  amount  of  the  emolument  attached  to  each 
precluded  all  temptation  of  abusing  it. 

Sir  Alexander  Ball  would  likewise,  it  is  probable,  urge,  that 
the  commercial  advantages  of  Malta,  which  were  most  intelli 
gible  to  the  English  public,  and  best  fitted  to  render  our  retention 
of  the  island  popular,  must  necessarily  be  of  very  slow  growth, 
though  finally  they  would  become  great,  and  of  an  extent  not  to 
be  calculated.  For  this  reason,  therefore,  it  was  highly  desirable 
that  the  possession  should  be,  arid  appear  to  be,  at  least  inex 
pensive.  After  the  British  Government  had  made  one  advance 
for  a  stock  of  corn  sufficient  to  place  the  island  a  year  before 
hand,  the  sum  total  drawn  from  Great  Britain  need  not  exceed 
25,  or  at  most  .£30,000  annually ;  excluding  of  coiirse  the  ex- 


ESSAY    VI.  513 

penditure  connected  with  our  own  military  and  navy,  and  the 
repair  of  the  fortifications,  which  latter  expense  ought  to  be 
much  less  than  at  Gibraltar,  from  the  multitude  and  low  wages 
of  the  laborers  in  Malta,  and  from  the  softness  arid  admirable 
quality  of  the  stone.  Indeed  much  more  might  safely  be  prom 
ised  on  the  assumption  that  a  wise  and  generous  system  of  policy 
would  be  adopted  and  persevered  in.  The  monopoly  of  the 
Maltese  corn-trade  by  the  government  formed  an  exception  to  a 
general  rule,  and  by  a  strange,  yet  valid,  anomaly  in  the  opera 
tions  of  political  economy,  was  riot  more  necessary  than  advan 
tageous  to  the  inhabitants.  The  chief  reason  is,  that  the  produce 
of  the  island  itself  barely  suffices  for  one  fourth  of  its  inhabitants, 
although  fruits  and  vegetables  form  so  large  a  part  of  their  nour 
ishment.  Meantime  the  harbors  of  Malta,  and  its  equi-distance 
from  Europe,  Asia,  and  Africa,  gave  it  a  vast  and  unnatural  im 
portance  in  the  present  relations  of  the  great  European  powers, 
and  imposed  on  its  government,  whether  native  or  dependent, 
the  necessity  of  considering  the  whole  island  as  a  single  garrison, 
the  provisioning  of  which  could  not  be  trusted  to  the  casualties 
of  ordinary  commerce.  "What  is  actually  necessary  is  seldom  in 
jurious.  Thus  in  Malta  bread  is  better  and  cheaper  on  an 
average  than  in  Italy  or  the  coast  of  Barbary  :  while  a  similar 
interference  with  the  corn-trade  in  Sicily  impoverishes  the  in 
habitants  and  keeps  the  agriculture  in  a  state  of  barbarism. 
But  the  point  in  question  is  the  expense  to  Great  Britain. 
Whether  the  monopoly  be  good  or  evil  in  itself,  it  remains  true, 
that  in  this  established  usage,  and  in  the  gradual  inclosure  of 
the  uncultivated  district,  such  resources  exist  as  without  the 
least  oppression  might  render  the  civil  government  in  Valetta 
independent  of  the  Treasury  at  home,  finally  taking  upon  itself 
even  the  repair  of  the  fortifications,  and  thus  realize  one  instance 
of  an  important  possession  that  costs  the  country  nothing. 

But  now  the  time  arrived,  which  threatened  to  frustrate  the 
patriotism  of  the  Maltese  themselves  and  all  the  zealous  efforts 
of  their  disinterested  friend.  Soon  after  the  war  had  for  the  first 
time  become  indisputably  just  and  necessary,  the  people  at  large, 
and  a  majority  of  independent  senators,  incapable,  as  it  might 
seem,  of  translating  their  fanatical  anti-Jacobinism  into  a  well- 
grounded,  yet  equally  impassioned,  ariti-Gallicanism,  grew  impa 
tient  for  peace,  or  rather  for  a  name,  under  which  the  most  ter- 

Y* 


614  THIRD    LANDING-PLACE. 

rifle  of  all  wars  would  be  incessantly  waged  against  us.  Our 
conduct  was  not  much  wiser  than  that  of  the  weary  traveller, 
who  having  proceeded  half-way  on  his  journey,  procured  a  short 
rest  for  himself  by  getting  up  behind  a  chaise  which  was  going 
the  contrary  road.  In  the  strange  treaty  of  Amiens,  in  which 
we  neither  recognized  our  former  relations  with  France,  nor  with 
the  other  European  powers,  nor  formed  any  new  ones,  the  com 
promise  concerning  Malta  formed  the  prominent  feature  :  and  its 
nominal  re-delivery  to  the  Order  of  St.  John  was  authorized  in 
the  minds  of  the  people  by  Lord  Nelson's  opinion  of  its  worth- 
lessness  to  Great  Britain  in  a  political  or  naval  view.  It  is  a 
melancholy  fact,  and  one  that  must  often  sadden  a  reflective  and 
philanthropic  mind,  how  little  moral  considerations  weigh  even 
with  the  noblest  nations,  how  vain  are  the  strongest  appeals  to 
justice,  humanity,  and  national  honor  unless  when  the  public 
mind  is  under  the  immediate  influence  of  the  cheerful  or  vehe 
ment  passions,  indignation  or  avaricious  hope.  In  the  whole 
class  of  human  infirmities  there  is  none,  that  makes  such  loud  ap 
peals  to  prudence,  and  yet  so  frequently  outrages  its  plainest  dic 
tates,  as  the  spirit  of  fear.  The  worst  cause  conducted  in  hope 
is  an  overmatch  for  the  noblest  managed  by  despondence  :  in 
both  cases  an  unnatural  conjunction  that  recalls  the  old  fable  of 
Love  and  Death,  taking  each  the  arrows  of  the  other  by  mistake. 
When  islands  that  had  courted  British  protection  in  reliance  upon 
British  honor,  are  with  their  inhabitants  and  proprietors  aban 
doned  to  the  resentment  which  we  had  tempted  them  to  provoke, 
what  wonder,  if  the  opinion  becomes  general,  that  alike  to  Eng 
land  as  to  France,  the  fates  and  fortunes  of  other  nations  are 
but  the  counters,  with  which  the  bloody  game  of  war  is  played  : 
and  that  notwithstanding  the  great  and  acknowledged  difference 
between  the  two  governments  during  possession,  yet  the  protection 
of  France  is  more  desirable  because  it  is  more  likely  to  endure  ?  for 
what  the  French  take,  they  keep.  Often  both  in  Sicily  and  Malta 
have  I  heard  the  case  of  Minorca  referred  to,  where  a  considerable 
portion  of  the  most  respectable  gentry  and  merchants  (no  pro 
vision  having  been  made  for  their  protection  on  the  re-delivery 
of  that  island  to  Spain)  expiated  in  dungeons  the  warmth  and 
forwardness  of  their  predilection  for  Great  Britain. 

It  has  been  by  some  persons  imagined  that  Lord  Nelson  was 
considerably  influenced,  in  his  public  declaration  concerning  the 


ES3AY    VL  515 

value  of  Malta,  by  ministerial  flattery,  and  his  own  sense  of  the 
great  serviceableness  of  that  opinion  to  the  persons  in  office.  This 
supposition  is,  however,  wholly  false  and  groundless.  His  lord 
ship's  opinion  was  indeed  greatly  shaken  afterwards,  if  not 
changed  ;  but  at  that  time  he  spoke  in  strictest  correspondence 
with  his  existing  convictions.  He  said  no  more  than  he  had 
often  previously  declared  to  his  private  friends  :  it  was  the  point 
on  which,  after  some  amicable  controversy,  his  lordship  and  Sir 
Alexander  Ball  had  "  agreed  to  differ."  Though  the  opinion  it 
self  may  have  lost  the  greatest  part  of  its  interest,  and  except  for 
the  historian  is,  as  it  were,  superannuated  ;'  yet  the  grounds  and. 
causes  of  it,  as  far  as  they  arose  out  of  Lord  Nelson's  particular 
character,  and  may  perhaps  tend  to  re-enliven  our  recollection  of 
a  hero  so  deeply  and  justly  beloved,  will  forever  possess  an  inter 
est  of  their  own.  In  an  essay,  too,  which  purports  to  be  no  more 
than  a  series  of  sketches  and  fragments,  the  reader,  it  is  hoped, 
will  readily  excuse  an  occasional  digression,  and  a  more  desultory 
style  of  narration  than  could  be  tolerated  in  a  work  of  regular 
biography. 

Lord  Nelson  was  an  admiral  every  inch  of  him.  He  looked  at 
everything,  not  merely  in  its  possible  relations  to  the  naval 
service  in  general,  but  in  its  immediate  bearings  on  his  own 
squadron  ;  to  his  officers,  his  men,  to  the  particular  ships  them 
selves  his  affections  were  as  strong  and  ardent  as  those  of  a  lover. 
Hence  though  his  temper  was  constitutionally  irritable  and  un 
even,  -yet  never  was  a  commander  so  enthusiastically  loved  by 
men  of  all  ranks  from  the  captain  of  the  fleet  to  the  youngest 
sliip-boy.  Hence  too  the  unexampled  harmony  which  reigned  in 
his  fleet  year  after  year,  under  circumstances  that  might  well 
have  undermined  the  patience  of  the  best  balanced  dispositions, 
much  more  of  men  with  the  impetuous  character  of  British 
sailors.  Year  after  year,  the  same  dull  duties  of  a  wearisome 
blockade  and  of  doubtful  policy  ;  little  if  any  opportunity  of 
making  prizes  ;  and  the  few  prizes,  which  accident  might  throw 
in  the  way,  of  little  or  no  value  ;  and  when  at  last  the  occasion 
presented  itself  which  would  have  compensated  for  all,  then  a 
disappointment  as  sudden  and  unexpected  as  it  was  unjust  and 
cruel,  and  the  cup  dashed  from  their  lips  ! — Add  to  these  trials 
the  sense  of  enterprises  checked  by  feebleness  and  timidity  else 
where,  not  omitting  the  tiresomeness  of  the  Mediterranean  sea,  sky, 


516  THIRD    LANDING-PLACE. 

and  climate  ;  and  the  unj  airing  and  cheerful  spirit  of  affectionate 
brotherhood,  which  linked  together  the  hearts  of  that  whole  squad 
ron,  will  appear  not  less  wonderful  to  us  than  admirable  and  affect 
ing.  When  the  resolution  was  taken  of  commencing  hostilities 
against  Spain,  before  any  intelligence  was  sent  to  Lord  Nelson, 
another  admiral,  with  two  or  three  ships  of  the  line,  was  sent 
into  the  Mediterranean,  and  stationed  before  Cadiz,  for  the  ex 
press  purpose  of  intercepting  the  Spanish  prizes.  The  admiral 
despatched  on  this  lucrative  service  gave  no  information  to  Lord 
Nelson  of  his  arrival  in  the  same  sea,  and  five  weeks  elapsed  be 
fore  his  lordship  became  acquainted  with  the  circumstance.  The 
prizes  thus  taken  were  immense.  A  month  or  two  sufficed  to 
enrich  the  commander  and  officers  of  this  small  arid  highly-fa 
vored  squadron  :  while  to  Nelson  and  his  fleet  the  sense  of  hav 
ing  done  their  duty,  and  the  consciousness  of  the  glorious  services 
which  they  had  performed  were  considered,  it  must  be  presumed, 
as  an  abundant  remuneration  for  all  their  toils  and  long-suffering  ! 
It  was  indeed  an  unexampled  circumstance,  that  a  small  squad 
ron  should  be  sent  to  the  station  which  had  been  long  occupied 
by  a  large  fleet,  commanded  by  the  dating  of  the  navy,  and  the 
glory  of  the  British  empire,  to  the  station  where  this  fleet  had  for 
years  been  wearing  away  in  the  most  barren,  repulsive,  and 
spirit-trying  service,  in  which  the  navy  can  be  employed  ;  and 
that  this  minor  squadron  should  be  sent  independently  of,  and 
without  any  communication  with,  the  commander  of  the  former 
fleet,  for  the  express  and  solitary  purpose  of  stepping  between  it 
and  the  Spanish  prizes,  and  as  soon  as  this  short  and  pleasant 
service  was  performed,  of  bringing  home  the  unshared  booty  with 
all  possible  caution,  and  despatch.  The  substantial  advantages 
of  naval  service  were  perhaps  deemed  of  too  gross  a  nature  for 
men  already  rewarded  with  the  grateful  affections  of  their  own 
countrymen,  and  the  admiration  of  the  whole  world.  They  were 
to  be  awarded,  therefore,  on  a  principle  of  compensation  to  a  com 
mander  less  rich  in  fame,  and  whose  laurels,  though  not  scanty, 
were  not  yet  sufficiently  luxuriant  to  hide  the  golden  crown  which 
is  the  appropriate  ornament  of  victory  in  the  bloodless  war  of 
commercial  capture.  Of  all  the  wounds  which  were  ever  in 
flicted  on  Nelson's  feelings  (and  there  were  not  a  few),  this  was 
the  deepest — this  rankled  most.  "  I  had  thought,"  (said  the 
gallant  man,  in  a  letter  written  in  the  first  sense  of  the  affront) 


ESSAY    VI.  617 

"  I  fancied — but  nay,  it  must  have  been  a  dream,  an  idle  dream 
— yet  J  confess  it,  I  did  fancy,  that  I  had  done  my  country  ser 
vice  ;  and  thus  they  use  me.  It  was  not  enough  to  have  robbed 
me  once  before  of  my  West-Indian  harvest ;  now  they  have  taken 
away  the  Spanish ;  and  under  what  circumstances,  and  with 
what  pointed  aggravations  !  Yet,  if  I  know  my  own  thoughts,  it 
is  not  for  myself,  or  on  my  own  account  chiefly,  that  I  feel  the 
sting  and  the  disappointment.  No  !  it  is  for  my  brave  officers  ; 
for  my  noble-minded  friends  and  comrades — such  a  gallant  set 
of  fellows  !  such  a  band  of  brothers  !  My  heart  swells  at  the 

thought  of  them  !" 

This  strong  attachment  of  the  heroic  admiral  to  his  fleet,  faith 
fully  repaid  by  an  equal  attachment  on  their  part  to  their  admi 
ral,  had  no  little  influence  in  attuning  their  hearts  to  each  other  ; 
and  when  he  died  it  seemed  as  if  no  man .  was  a  stranger  to 
another  :  for  all  were  made  acquaintances  by  the  rights  of  a  com 
mon  anguish.  In  the  fleet  itself,  many  a  private  quarrel  was 
forgotten,  no  more  to  be  remembered  ;  many,  who  had  been  alien 
ated,  became  once  more  good  friends  ;  yea,  many  a  one  was  re 
conciled  to  his  very  enemy,  .and  loved,  and  (as  it  were)  thanked 
him,  for  the  bitterness  of  his  grief,  as  if  it  had  been  an  act  of 
consolation  to  himself  in  an  intercourse  of  private  sympathy.  The 
tidings  arrived  at  Naples  on  the  day  that  I  returned  to  that  city 
from  Calabria  :  and  never  can  I  forget  the  sorrow  and  consterna 
tion  that  lay  on  every  countenance.  Even  to  this  day  there  are 
times  when  I  seem  to  see,  as  in  a  vision,  separate  groups  and  in 
dividual  faces  of  the  picture.  Numbers  stopped  and  shook  hands 
with  me,  because  they  had  seen  the  tears  on  my  cheek,  and  con- 
.jectured  that  I  was  an  Englishman;  and  several,  as  they  held 
my  hand,  burst  themselves  into  tears.  And  though  it  may  ex 
cite  a  smile,  yet  it  pleased  and  affected  me,  as  a  proof  of  the  good 
ness  of  the  human  heart  struggling  to  exercise  its  kindness  in 
spite  of  prejudices  the  most  obstinate,  and  eager  to  carry  on  its 
love  and  honor  into  the  life  beyond  life,  that  it  was  whispered 
about  Naples  that  Lord  Nelson  had  become  a  good  Catholic  be 
fore  his  death.  The  absurdity  of  the  fiction  is  a  sort  of  measure 
ment  of  the  fond  and  affectionate  esteem  which  had  ripened  the 
pious  wish  of  some  kind  individual,  through  all  the  gradations  of 
possibility  and  probability,  into  a  confident  assertion  believed  and 
affirmed  by  hundreds.  The  feelings  of  Great  Britain  on  this 


518  THIRD    LANDING-PLACE. 

awful  event  have  been  described  well  and  worthily  by  a  living 
poet,  who  has  happily  blended  the  passion  and  wild  transitions 
of  lyric  song  with  the  swell  and  solemnity  of  epic  narration  : 

Thou  art  full'n ;  fall'n,  in  the  lap 

Of  victory.     To  thy  country  thou  cam'st  back, 
Thou,  conqueror,  to  triumphal  Albion  cam'st 
A  corse  !     I  saw  before  thy  hearse  pass  on 
The  comrades  of  thy  perils  and  renown. 
The  frequent  tear  upon  their  dauntless  breasts 
Fell.     I  beheld  the  pomp  thick  gather'd  round 
The  trophied  car  that  bore  thy  grac'd  remains 
Thro*  arm'd  ranks,  and  a  nation  gazing  on. 
Bright  glow'd  the  sun  and  not  a  cloud  distaiu'd 
Heaven's  arch  of  gold,  but  all  was  gloom  beneath. 
A  holy  and  unutterable  pang 
Thrill'd  on  the  soul.     Awe  and  mute  anguish  fell 
On  all. — Yet  high  the  public  bosom  throbb'd 
With  triumph.     And  if  one,  'mid  that  vast  pomp, 
If  but  the  voice  of  one  had  shouted  forth 
The  name  of  Nelson, — thou  hadst  pass'd  along, 
Thou  in  thy  hearse  to  burial  pass'd,  as  oft 
Before  the  van  of  battle,  proudly  rode 
Thy  prow,  down  Britain's  line,  shout  after  shout 
Rending  the  air  with  triumph,  ere  thy  hand 
Had  lanc'd  the  bolt  of  victory.* 

I  introduced  this  digression  with  an  apology,  yet  have  extended 
it  so  much  further  than  I  had  designed,  that  I  must  once  more 
request  my  reader  to  excuse  me.  It  was  to  be  expected  (I  have 
said)  that  Lord  Nelson  would  appreciate  the  isle  of  Malta  from  its 
relations  to  the  British  fleet  on  the  Mediterranean  station.  It  was 
the  fashion  of  the  day  to  style  Egypt  the  key  of  India,  and  Malta 
the  key  of  Egypt.  Nelson  saw  the  hollowness  of  this  metaphor  ; 
or  if  he  only  doubted  its  applicability  in  the  former  instance,  he 
was  sure  that  it  was  false  in  the  latter.  Egypt  might  or  might 
not  be  the  key  of  India  ;  but  Malta  was  certainly  riot  the  key  of 
Egypt.  It  was  not  intended  to  keep  constantly  two  distinct  fleets 
in  that  sea  ;  and  the  largest  naval  force  at  Malta  would  not 
supersede  the  necessity  of  a  squadron  off  Toulon.  Malta  does 
not  lie  in  the  direct  course  from  Toulon  to  Alexandria  :  and  from 
the  nature  of  the  winds  (one  time  taken  with  another)  the  com 
parative  length  of  the  voyage  to  the  latter  port  will  be  found  far 

*  Sotheby's  Saul.— .Etf. 


ESSAY    VI.  619 

less  than  a  view  of  the  map  would  suggest,  and  in  truth  of  little 
practical  importance.  If  it  were  the  object  of  the  French  fleet 
to  avoid  Malta  in  its  passage  to  Egypt,  the  port-admiral  of  Va- 
letta  would  in  all  probability  receive  his  first  intelligence  of  its 
course  from  Minorca  or  the  squadron  ofF  Toulon,  instead  of  com 
municating  it.  In  what  regarded  the  re-fitting  and  provisioning 
of  the  fleet,  either  on  ordinary  or  extraordinary  occasions,  Malta 
was  as  inconvenient  as  Minorca  was  advantageous,  not  only  from 
its  distance  (which  yet  was  sufficient  to  render  it  almost  useless 
in  cases  of  the  most  pressfng  necessity,  as  after  a  severe  action  or 
injuries  of  tempest)  but  likewise  from  the  extreme  difficulty,  if 
not  impracticability,  of  leaving  the  harbor  of  Valetta  with  a  N.  W. 
wind,  which  often  lasts  for  weeks  together.  In  all  these  points 
his  lordship's  observations  were  perfectly  just ;  and  it  must  be 
conceded  by  all  persons  acquainted  with  the  situation  and  circum 
stances  of  Malta,  that  its  importance,  as  a  British  possession,  if 
not  exaggerated  on  the  whole,  was  unduly  magnified  in  several 
important  particulars.  Thus  Lord  Minto,  in  a  speech  delivered 
at  a  country  meeting  and  afterwards  published,  affirmed,  that 
upon  the  supposition  (which  no  one  could  consider  as  unlikely  to 
take  place)  that  the  court  of  Naples  should  be  compelled  to  act 
under  the  influence  of  France,  and  that  the  Barbary  powers  were 
unfriendly  to  us,  either  in  consequence  of  French  intrigues  or  from 
their  own  caprice  and  insolence,  there  would  not  be  a  single  port, 
harbor,  bay,  creek,  or  road-stead  in  the  whole  Mediterranean, 
from  which  our  men  of  war  could  obtain  a  single  ox  or  a  hogshead 
of  fresh  water, — unless  Great  Britain  retained  possession  of 
Malta.  The  noble  speaker  seems  not  to  have  been  aware,  .that 
under  the  circumstances  supposed  by  him,  Odessa  too  being  closed 
against  us  by  a  Russian  war,  the  island  of  Malta  itself  would  be 
no  better  than  a  vast  almshouse  of  75,000  persons,  exclusively 
of  the  British  soldiers,  all  of  whom  must  be  regularly  supplied 
with  corn  and  salt  meat  from  Great  Britain  or  Ireland.  The 
population  of  Malta  and  Gozo  exceeds  100,000  ;  while  the  food 
of  all  kinds  produced  on  the  two  islands  would  barely  suffice  for 
one-fourth  of  that  number.  The  deficiency  is  supplied  by  the 
growth  and  spinning  of  cotton,  for  which  corn  could  not  be  sub 
stituted  from  the  nature  of  the  soil,  or  were  it  attempted,  would 
produce  but  a  small  proportion  of  the  quantity  which  the  cotton 


520  THIRD    LANDING-PLACE. 

raised  on  the  same  fields  and  spun*  into  thread,  enables  the 
Maltese  to  purchase  ; — not  to  mention  that  the  substitution  of 
grain  for  cotton  would  leave  half  of  the  inhabitants  without  em 
ployment.  As  to  live  stock,  it  is  quite  out  of  the  question,  if  we 
except  the  pigs  and  goats,  which  perform  the  office  of  scavengers 
in  the  streets  of  Valetta  and  the  towns  on  the  other  side  of  the 
Porto  Grande. 

Against  these  latter  arguments  Sir  A.  Ball  placed  the  follow 
ing  considerations.  It  had  been  long  his  conviction,  that  the 
Mediterranean  squadron  should  be  supplied  by  regular  store-ships, 
the  sole  business  of  which  should  be  that  of  carriers  for  the  fleet. 
This  he  recommended  as  by  far  the  most  economic  plan,  in  the 
first  instance.  Secondly,  beyond  any  other  it  would  secure  a  sys 
tem  and  regularity  in  the  arrival  of  supplies.  And,  lastly,  it 
would  conduce  to  the  discipline  of  the  navy,  and  prevent  both 
ships  and  officers  from  being  out  of  the  way  on  any  sudden 
emergence.  If  this  system  were  introduced,  the  objections  to 
Malta,  from  its  great  distance,  and  the  like,  would  have  little 
force.  On  the  other  hand,  ^e  objections  to  Minorca  he  deemed 
irremovable.  The  same  disadvantages  which  attended  the  getting 
out  of  the  harbor  of  Yaletta,  applied  to  vessels  getting  into  Port 
Mahon ;  but  while  fifteen  hundred  or  two  thousand  British  troops 
might  be  safely  intrusted  with  the  preservation  of  Malta,  the 
troops  for  the  defence  of  Minorca  must  ever  be  in  proportion  to 
those  which  the  enemy  may  be  supposed  likely  to  send  against  it. 
It  is  so  little  favored  by  nature  or  by  art,  that  the  possessors  stand 
merely  on  the  level  with  the  invaders.  Cceteris  paribus,  if 
there  were  12,000  of  the  enemy  landed,  there  must  be  an  equal 
number  to  repel  them  ;  nor  could  the  garrison,  or  any  part  of  it 
be  spared  for  any  sudden  emergence  without  risk  of  losing  the 

*  The  Maltese  cotton  is  naturally  of  a  deep  buff,  or  dusky  orange  color, 
and,  by  the  laws  of  the  island,  must  be  spun  before  it  can  be  exported.  I 
have  heard  it  asserted  by  persons  apparently  well  informed  on  the  subject, 
that  the  raw  material  would  fetch  as  high  a  price  as  the  thread,  weight  for 
weight ;  the  thread  from  its  coarseness  being  applicable  to  few  purposes. 
It  is  manufactured  likewise  for  the  use  of  the  natives  themselves  into  a 
coarse  nankin,  which  never  loses  its  color  by  washing  and  is  durable  beyond 
any  clothing  I  have  ever  known  or  heard  of.  The  cotton  seed  is  used  as  a 
food  for  the  cattle  that  are  not  immediately  wanted  for  the  market:  it  is 
very  nutritious,  but  changes  the  fat  of  the  animal  into  a  kind  of  suet,  con 
gealing  quickly,  and  of  an  adhesive  substance. 


ESSAY    VI.  521 

island.  Previously  to  the  battle  of  Marengo,  the  most  earnest 
representations  were  made  to  the  governor  and  commander  at 
Minorca  by  the  British  admiral,  who  offered  to  take  on  himself 
the  whole  responsibility  of  the  measure,  if  he  would  permit  the 
troops  at  Minorca  to  join  our  allies.  The  governor  felt  himself 
compelled  to  refuse  his  assent.  Doubtless,  he  acted  wisely,  for 
responsibility  is  not  transferable.  The  fact  is  introduced  in  proof 
of  the  defenceless  state  of  Minorca,  and  its  constant  liability  to 
attack.  If  the  Austrian  army  had  stood  in  the  same  relation  to 
eight  or  nine  thousand  British  soldiers  at  Malta,  a  single  regiment 
would  have  precluded  all  alarms,  as  to  the  island  itself,  and  the 
remainder  have  perhaps  changed  the  destiny  of  Europe.  What 
might  not,  almost  I  would  say,  what  must  not  eight  thousand 
Britons  have  accomplished  at  the  battle  of  Marengo,  nicely  poised 
as  the  fortunes  of  the  two  armies  are  now  known  to  have  been  ? 
Minorca  too  is  alone  useful  or  desirable  during  a  war,  and  on  the 
supposition  of  a  fleet  off  Toulon.  The  advantages  of  Malta  are 
permanent  and  national.  As  a  second  Gibraltar,  it  must  tend  to 
secure  Gibraltar  itself;  for  if  by  the  loss  of  that  one  place  we 
could  be  excluded  from  the  Mediterranean,  it  is  difficult  to  say 
what  sacrifices  of  blood  and  treasure  the  enemy  would  deem  too 
high  a  price  for  its  conquest.  "Whatever  Malta  may  or  may  not 
be  respecting  Egypt,  its  high  importance  to  the  independence  of 
Sicily  can  not  be  doubted,  or  its  advantages,  ao  a  central  station, 
for  any  portion  of  our  disposable  force.  Neither  is  the  influence 
which  it  will  enable  us  to  exert  on  the  Barbary  powers  to  be 
wholly  neglected.  I  shall  only  add,  that  during  the  plague  at 
Gibraltar,  Lord  Nelson  himself  acknowledged  that  he  began  to 
see  the  possession  of  Malta  in  a  different  light. 

Sir  Alexander  Ball  looked  forward  to  future  contingencies  as 
likely  to  increase  the  value  of  Malta  to  Great  Britain.  He  fore 
saw  that  the  whole  of  Italy  would  become  a  French  province,  and 
he  knew  that  the  French  government  had  been  long  intriguing  on 
the  coast  of  Barbary.  The  Dey  of  Algiers  was  believed  to  have 
accumulated  a  treasure  of  fifteen  millions  sterling,  and  Bonaparte 
had  actually  duped  him  into  a  treaty,  by  which  the  French  were 
to  be  permitted  to  erect  a  fort  on  the  very  spot  where  the  ancient 
Hippo  stood,  the  choice  between  which  and  the  Hellespont  as  the 
site  of  New  Rome  is  said  to  have  perplexed  the  judgment  of 
Constantino.  To  this  he  added  an  additional  point  of  connection 


522  "THIRD    LANDING-PLACE. 

with  Russia,  by  means  of  Odessa,  and  on  the  supposition  of  a  war 
in  the  Baltic,  a  still  more  interesting  relation  to  Turkey,  and  the 
Morea,  and  the  Greek  islands. — It  had  been  repeatedly  signified 
to  the  British  government,  that  from  the  Morea  and  the  countries 
adjacent,  a  considerable  supply  of  ship  timber  arid  naval  stores 
might  be  obtained,  such  as  would  at  least  greatly  lessen  the  pres 
sure  of  a  Russian  war.  The  agents  of  France  were  .in  full  ac 
tivity  in  the  Morea  and  the  Greek  islands,  the  possession  of  which 
by  that  government  would  augment  the  naval  resources  of  the 
French  to  a  degree  of  which  few  are  aware,  who  have  not  made 
the  present  state  of  commerce  of  the  Greeks  an  object  of  particu 
lar  attention.  In  short,  if  the  possession  of  Malta  were  advanta 
geous  to  England  solely  as  a  convenient  watch-tower,  as  a  centre 
of  intelligence,  its  importance  would  be  undeniable. 

Although  these  suggestions  did  not  prevent  the  signing  away 
of  Malta  at  the  peace  of  Amiens,  they  doubtless  were  not  with 
out  effect,  when  the  ambition  of  Bonaparte  had  given  a  full. and 
final  answer  to  the  grand  question  :  can  we  remain  in  peace  with 
France  ?  I  have  likewise  reason  to  believe,  that  Sir  Alexander 
Ball  baffled  by  exposure  an  insidious  proposal  of  the  French  gov 
ernment,  during  the  negotiations  that  preceded  the  recommence 
ment  of  the  war — that  the  fortifications  of  Malta  should  be  en 
tirely  dismantled,  and  the  island  left  to  its  inhabitants.  Without 
dwelling  on  the  obvious  inhumanity  and  flagitious  injustice  of 
exposing  the  Maltese  to  certain  pillage  and  slavery  from  their 
old  and  inveterate  enemies  the  Moors,  he  showed  that  the  plan 
would  promote  the  interests  of  Bonaparte  even  more  than  his 
actual  possession  of  the  island,  which  France  had  no  possible 
interest  in  desiring,  except  as  the  means  of  keeping  it  out  of  the 
hands  of  Great  Britain. 

But  Sir  Alexander  Ball  is  no  more.  I  still  cling  to  the  hope 
that  I  may  yet  be  enabled  to  record  his  good  deeds  more  fully 
and  regularly  ;  that  then,  with  a  sense  of  comfort  not  without  a 
subdued  exultation,  I  may  raise  heaven-ward  from  his  honored 
tomb  the  glistening  eye  of  a  humble  but  ever  grateful  friend. 


APPENDIX. 


APPENDIX. 


A. 

PROSPECTUS  OF  THE  FRIEND,  (EXTRACTED  FEOM  A  LETTER  TO  A 
CORRESPONDENT;.) 

IT  is  not  unknown  to  you,  that  I  have  employed  almost  the  whole 
of  my  life  in  acquiring,  or  endeavoring  to  acquire,  useful  knowledge 
by  study,  reflection,  observation,  and  by  cultivating  the  society  of  my 
superiors  in  intellect,  both  at  home  and  in  foreign  countries.  You 
know,  too,  that  at  different  periods  of  my  life  I  have  not  only  planned, 
but  collected  the  materials  for,  many  works  on  various  and  important 
subjects ;  so  many  indeed,  that  the  number  of  my  unrealized  schemes 
and  the  mass  of  my  miscellaneous  fragments  have  often  furnished  my 
friends  with  a  subject  of  raillery,  and  sometimes  of  regret  and  reproof. 
Waiving  the  mention  of  all  private  and  accidental  hinderances,  I  am 
inclined  to  believe  that  this  want  of  perseverance  has  been  produced 
in  the  main  by  an  over-activity  of  thought,  modified  by  a  constitu 
tional  indolence,  which  made  it  more  pleasant  to  me  to  continue  ac 
quiring,  than  to  reduce  what  I  had  acquired  to  a  regular  form.  Add, 
too,  that  almost  daily  throwing  oft*  my  notices  or  reflections  in  desul 
tory  fragments,  I  was  still  tempted  onward  by  an  increasing  sense  of 
the  imperfection  of  my  knowledge,  and  by  the  conviction  that,  in  or 
der  fully  to  comprehend  and  develop  any  one  subject,  it  was  neces 
sary  that  I  should  make  myself  master  of  some  other,  which  again  as 
regularly  involved  a  third,  and  so  on  with  an  ever-widening  horizon. 
Yet  one  habit,  formed  during  long  absences  from  those  with  whom  I 
could  converse  with  full  sympathy,  has  been  of  advantage  to  me, — 
that  of  daily  noting  down  in  my  memorandum  or  common-place 
books  both  incidents  and  observations ; — whatever  had  occurred  to 
me  from  without,  and  all  the  flux  and  reflux  of  my  mind  within  itself. 
The  number  of  these  notices  and  their  tendency,  miscellaneous  as 
they  were,  to  one  common  end — (quid  sumus  et  quid  futuri  gigni- 
mur.  what  we  are  and  what  wre  are  born  to  become ;  and  thus  from 


526  APPENDIX    A. 

the  end  of  our  being  to  deduce  its  proper  objects) — first  encouraged 
me  to  undertake  the  weekly  essay,  of  which  you  will  consider  this 
letter  as  the  prospectus. 

Not  only  did  the  plan  seem  to  accord  better  than  any  other  with 
the  nature  of  my  own  mind,  both  in  its  strength  and  in  its  weakness  ; 
but,  conscious  that  in  upholding  some  principles  both  of  taste  and 
philosophy,  adopted  by  the  great  men  of  Europe,  from  the  middle  of 
the  fifteenth  till  toward  the  close  of  the  seventeenth  century,  I  must 
run  counter  to  many  prejudices  of  many  of  my  readers  (for  old  faith 
is  often  modern  heresy),  I  perceived  too  in  a  periodical  essay  the  most 
likely  means  of  winning  instead  of  forcing  my  way.  The  truth  sup 
posed  on  my  side,  the  shock  of  the  first  day  might  be  so  far  lessened 
by  the  reflections  of  succeeding  days,  as  to  procure  for  my  next  week's 
essay  a  less  hostile  reception  than  it  would  have  met  with  had  it  been 
only  the  next  chapter  of  a  present  volume.  I  hoped  to  disarm  the 
mind  of  those  feelings,  which  preclude  conviction  by  contempt,  and, 
as  it  were,  fling  the  door  in*  the  face  of  reasoning  by  a  presumption 
of  its  absurdity.  A  motive  too  for  honorable  ambition  was  supplied 
by  the  fact,  that  every  periodical  paper  of  the  kind  now  attempted, 
which  had  been  conducted  with  zeal  and  ability,  was  not  only  well 
received  at  the  time,  but  has  become  permanently,  and  in  the  best 
sense  of  the  word,  popular.  By  honorable  ambition  I  mean  the 
strong  desire  to  be  useful,  aided  by  the  wish  to  be  generally  acknowl 
edged  to  have  been  so.  As  I  feel  myself  actuated  in  no  ordinary  de 
gree  by  this  desire,  so  the  hope  of  realizing  it  appears  less  and  less 
presumptuous  to  me  since  I  have  received  from  men  of  highest  rank 
and  established  character  in  the  republic  of  letters,  not  only  strong 
encouragements  as  to  my  own  fitness  for  the  undertaking,  but  like 
wise  promises  of  support  from  their  own  stores. 

The  object  of  The  Friend,  briefly  and  generally  expressed,  is — to  up 
hold  those  truths  and  those  merits,  which  are  founded  in  the  nobler 
and  permanent  parts  of  our  nature,  against  the  caprices  of  fashion  and 
such  pleasures  as  either  depend  on  transitory  and  accidental  causes, 
or  are  pursued  from  less  worthy  impulses.  The  chief  subjects  of  my 
own  essays  will  be : 

The  true  and  sole  ground  of  morality  or  virtue,  as  distinguished 
from  prudence : 

The  origin  and  growth  of  moral  impulses,  as  distinguished  from  ex 
ternal  and  immediate  motives : 

The  necessary  dependence  of  taste  on  moral  impulses  and  habits, 
and  the  nature  of  taste  (relative  to  judgment  in  general  and  to  genius) 
defined,  illustrated,  and  applied.  Under  this  head  I  comprise  the  sub 
stance  of  the  Lectures  given,  and  intended  to  have  been  given,  at  the 
Royal  Institution  on  the  distinguished  English  poets,  in  illustration  of 
the  general  principles  of  poetry  ;  together  with  suggestions  concern- 


APPENDIX    A.  527 

ing  the  affinity  of  the  fine  arts  to  each  other,  and  the  principles  com- 
\  mon  to  them  all ; — architecture ;  gardening ;  dress ;  music ;  painting ; 
poetry : 

The  opening  out  of  new  objects  of  just  admiration  in  our  own  laii- 
;guage,  and  information  'as  to  the  present  state  and  past  history  of 
'Swedish,  Danish,  German,  and  Italian  literature, — to  which,  but  as 
supplied  by  a  friend,  I  may  add  the  Spanish,  Portuguese,  and  French 
— as  far  as  the  same  has  not  been  already  given  to  English  readers, 
or  is  not  to  be  found  in  common  French  authors : 

Characters  met  with  in  real  life ; — anecdotes  and  resulte  of  my  own 
life  and  travels,  as  tar  as  they  are  illustrative  of  general  moral  laws, 
and  have  no  direct  bearing  on  personal  or  immediate  politics : 

Education  in  its  widest  sense,  private  and  national : 

Sources  of  consolation  to  the  afflicted  in  misfortune,  or  disease,  or 
dejection  of  mind,  from  the  exertion  and  right  application  of  the  rea 
son,  the  imagination,  and  the  moral  sense ;  and  new  sources  of  enjoy 
ment  opened  out,  or  an  attempt  (as  an  illustrious  friend  once  ex 
pressed  the  thought  to  me)  to  add  sunshine  to  daylight,  by  making 
the  happy  more  happy.  In  the  words  u  Dejection  of  mind"  I  refer 
particularly  to  doubt  or  disbelief  of  the  moral  government  of  the 
world,  and  the  grounds  and  arguments  for  the  religious  hopes  of  hu 
man  nature.  , 

Such  are  the  chief  subjects  in  the  development  of  which  I  hope  to 
realize,  to  a  certain  extent,  the  great  object  of  my  essays.  It  will 
assuredly  be  my  endeavor,  by  as  much  variety  as  is  consistent  with 
that  object,  to  procure  entertainment  for  my  readers  as  well  as  in 
struction  :  yet  I  feel  myself  compelled  to  hazard  the  confession,  that 
such  of  my  readers  as  make  the  latter  the  paramount  motive  for  their 
encouragement  of  The  Friend,  will  receive  the  largest  portion  of  the 
former.  I  have  heard  it  said  of  a  young  lady, — "if  you  are  told, 
before  you  see  her,  that  she  is  handsome,  you  will  think  her  ordi 
nary  ;  if  that  she  is  ordinary,  you  will  think  her  handsome."  I  may 
perhaps  apply  this  remark  to  my  own  essays.  If  instruction  and  the 
increase  of  honorable  motives  and  virtuous  impulses  be  chiefly  ex 
pected,  there  will,  I  would  fain  hope,  be  felt  no  deficiency  of  amuse 
ment  ;  but  I  must  submit  to  be  thought  dull  by  those  who  seek 
amusement  only.  The  Friend  will  be  distinguished  from  its  cele 
brated  predecessors,  the  Spectator  and  the  like,  as  to  its  plan,  chiefly 
by  the  greater  length  of  the  separate  essays,  by  their  closer  connec 
tion  with  each  other,  and  by  the  predominance  of  one  object,  and  the 
common  bearing  of  all  to  one  end. 

It  would  be  superfluous  to  state,  that  I  shall  receive  with  gratitude 
any  communications  addressed  to  me :  but  it  may  be  proper  to  say, 
that  all  remarks  and  criticisms  in  praise  or  dispraise  of  my  contem 
poraries  (to  which,  however,  nothing  but  a  strong  sense  of  moral  in- 


528  APPENDIX    B. 

terest  will  ever  lead  me)  will  be  written  by  myself  only ;  both  be 
cause  I  can  not  have  the  same  certainty  concerning  the  motives  of 
others,  and  because  I  deem  it  fit,  that  such  strictures  should  always 
be  attended  by  the  name  of  their  author,  and  that  one  and  the  same 
person  should  be  solely  responsible  for  the  insertion  as  well  as  compo 
sition  of  the  same. 


B. 

COMMENCEMENT   OF   NO.    I. 

IF  it  be  usual  with  writers  in  general  to  find  the  first  paragraph 
of  their  works  that  which  has  given  them  the  most  trouble  with  the 
least  satisfaction,  The  Friend  may  be  allowed  to  feel  the  difficulties 
and  anxiety  of  a  first  introduction  in  a  more  than  ordinary  degree. 
He  is  embarrassed  by  the  very  circumstances  that  discriminate  the 
plan  and  purposes  of  the  present  weekly  paper  from  those  of  its 
periodical  brethren,  as  well  as  from  its  more  dignified  literary  rela 
tions,  which  come  forth  at  once  and  in  full  growth  from  their  parents. 
If  it  had  been  my  ambition  to  have  copied  its  whole  scheme  and 
fashion  from  the  great  founders  of  the  race,  the  Tatler  and  Spectator, 
I  should,  indeed  have  exposed  my  essays  to  a  greater  hazard  of  un 
kind  comparison.  An  imperfect  imitation  is  often  felt  as  a  contrast. ' 
On  the  other  hand,  however,  the  very  names  and  descriptions  of  the 
fictitious  characters,  which  I  had  proposed  to  assume  in  the  course 
of  my  work,  would  have  put  me  at  once  in  possession  of  the  stage  5 
and  my  first  act  have  opened  with  a  procession  of  masks.  Again,  if 
I  were  composing  one  work  on  one  given  object,  the  same  acquaint 
ance  with  its  grounds  and  bearings,  which  had  authorized  me  to  pub 
lish  my  opinions,  would,  with  its  principles  or  fundamental  facts, 
have  supplied  me  with  my  best  and  most  appropriate  commence 
ment.  More  easy  still  would  my  task  have  been,  had  I  planned  The 
Friend  chiefly  as  a  vehicle  for  a  weekly  descant  on  public  characters 
and  political  parties.  My  perfect  freedom  from  all  warping  influ 
ences  ;  the  distance  which  permitted  a  distinct  view  of  the  game, 
yet  secured  me  from  its  passions ;  the  liberty  of  the  press ;  and  its 
especial  importance  at  the  present  period  from  whatever  event  or 
topic  might  happen  to  form  the  great  interest  of  the  day ;  in  short, 
the  recipe  was  ready  to  my  hand,  and  it  was  framed  so  skilfully,  and 
has  been  practised  with  such  constant  effect,  that  it  would  have  been 
affectation  to  have  deviated  from  it.  For  originality  for  its  own  sake 
merely  is  idle  at  the  best,  and  sometimes  monstrous.  Excuse  me, 


APPENDIX    B.  529 

therefore,  gentle  reader !  if  borrowing  from  my  title  a  right  of  an 
ticipation,  I  avail  myself  of  the  privileges  of  a  friend  before  I  have 
earned  them ;  and  waiving  the  ceremony  of  a  formal  introduction, 
permit  me  to  proceed  at  once  to  the  subject,  trite  indeed  and  familiar 
as  the  first  lessons  of  childhood ;  which  yet  must  be  the  foundation 
of  my  future  superstructure  with  all  its  ornaments,  the  hidden  root 
of  the  tree,  I  am  attempting  to  rear,  with  all  its  branches  and  boughs. 
But  if  from  it  I  have  deduced  my  strongest  moral  motives  for  this 
undertaking,  it  has  at  the  same  time  been  applied  in  suggesting  the 
most  formidable  obstacle  to  my  success, — as  far,  I  mean,  as  my  plan 
alone  is  concerned,  and  not  the  talents  necessary  for  its  completion. 

Conclusions  drawn  from  facts  which  subsist  in  perpetual  flux,  with 
out  definite  place  or  fixed  quantity,  must  always  be  liable  to  plausible 
objections,  nay,  often  to  unanswerable  difficulties ;  and  yet,  having 
their  foundation  in  uncorrupted  feeling,  are  assented  to  by  mankind 
at  large,  and  in  all  ages,  as  undoubted  truths.  As  our  notions  con 
cerning  them  are  almost  equally  obscure,  so  are  our  convictions 
almost  equally  vivid,  with  those  of  our  life  and  individuality.  Re 
garded  with  awe  as  guiding  principles  by  the  founders  of  law  and 
religion,  they  are  the  favorite  objects  of  attack  with  mock  philoso 
phers,  and  the  demagogues  in  church,  state,  and  literature ;  and  the 
denial  of  them  has  in  all  times,  though  at  various  intervals,  formed 
heresies  and  systems,  which,  after  their  day  of  wonder,  are  regularly 
exploded,  and  again  as  regularly  revived  when  they  have  re-acquired 
novelty  by  courtesy  of  oblivion. 

Among  these  universal  persuasions  we  must  place  the  sense  of  a 
selt-contradicting  principle  in  our  nature,  or  a  disharmony  in  the  dif 
ferent  impulses  that  constitute  it ; — of  a  something  which  essentially 
distinguishes  man  both  from  all  other  animals  that  are  known  to 
exist,  and  from  the  idea  of  his  own  nature,  or  conception  of  the 
original  man.  In  health  and  youth  we  may  indeed  connect  the  glow 
and  buoyance  of  our  bodily  sensations  with  the  words  of  a  theory, 
and  imagine  that  we  hold  it  with  a  firm  belief.  The  pleasurable  heat 
which  the  blood  or  the  breathing  generates,  the  sense  of  external  re 
ality  which  comes  with  the  strong  grasp  of  the  hand,  or  the  vigor 
ous  tread  of  the  foot,  may  indifferently  become  associated  with  the 
rich  eloquence  of  a  Shaftesbury,  imposing  on  us  man's  possible  per 
fections  for  his  existing  nature ;  or  with  the  cheerless  and  hardier 
impieties  of  a  Hobbes,  while  cutting  the  Gordian  knot  he  denies  the 
reality  of  either  vice  or  virtue,  and  explains  away  the  mind's  self- 
reproach  into  a  distempered  ignorance,  an  epidemic  affection  of  the 
human  nerves  and  their  habits  of  motion. 

"  Vain  wisdom  all,  and  false  philosophy!" 

I  shall  hereafter  endeavor  to  prove,  how  distinct  and  different  the 

VOL.  H.  Z 


530  APPENDIX    B. 

sensation  of  positiveness  is  from  the  sense  of  certainty; — the  tur 
bulent  heat  of  temporary  fermentation  from  the  mild  warmth  of 
essential  life.  Suffice  it  for  the  present  to  affirm,  to  declare  it  at 
least,  as  my  own  creed,  that  whatever  humbles  the  heart,  and  forces 
the  mind  inward,  whether  it  be  sickness,  or  grief,  or  remorse,  or  the 
deep  yearnings  of  love  [and  there  have  been  children  of  affliction  for 
whom  all  these  have  met  and  made  up  one  complex  suffering],  in 
proportion  as  it  acquaints  us  with  the  thing  we  are,  renders  us  docile 
to  the  concurrent  testimony  of  our  fellow-men  in  all  ages  and  in  all 
nations.  From  Pascal  in  his  closet  resting  the  arm,  which  supports 
his  thoughtful  brow,  on  a  pile  of  demonstrations,  to  the  poor  pensive 
Indian  that  seeks  the  missionary  in  the  American  wilderness,  the 
humiliated  self-exaniinant  feels  that  there  is  evil  in  our  nature  as 
well  as  good ; — an  evil  and  a  good,  for  a  just  analogy  to  which  he 
questions  all  other  natures  in  vain.  It  is  still  the  great  definition  of 
humanity,  that  wre  have  a  conscience,  which  no  mechanic  compost, 
no  chemical  combination  of  mere  appetence,  memory  and  under 
standing,  can  solve ;  which  is  indeed  an  element  of  our  being ; — a 
conscience,  unrelenting  yet  not  absolute ;  which  we  may  stupefy  but 
can  not  delude ;  which  we  may  suspend  but  can  not  annihilate ; 
although  we  may  perhaps  find  a  treacherous  counterfeit  in  the  very 
quiet  which  we  derive  from  its  slumber,  or  its  enhancement. 

Of  so  mysterious  a  pJicBiwrnenon  we  might  expect  a  cause  as  mysteri 
ous.  Accordingly,  we  find  this  [cause  be  it,  or  condition,  or  necessary 
accompaniment]  involved  and  implied  in  the  fact,  which  it  alone  can 
explain.  Tor  if  our  permanent  consciousness  did  not  reveal  to  us  our 
free-agency,  we  should  yet  be  obliged  to  deduce  it,  as  a  necessary  in 
ference,  from  the  fact  of  our  conscience :  or  rejecting  both  the  one 
and  the  other,  as  mere  illusions  of  internal  feelings,  forfeit  all. power 
of  thinking  consistently  with  our  actions,  or  acting  consistently  with 
our  thought,  for  any  single  hour  during  our  whole  lives.  But  I  am 
proceeding  farther  than  I  had  wished  or  intended.  It  will  be  long 
ere  I  shall  dare  flatter  myself  that  I  have  won  the  confidence  of  my 
reader  sufficiently  to  require  of  him  that  effort  of  attention,  which  the 
regular  establishment  of  this  truth  would  require. 

After  the  brief  season  of  youthful  hardihood,  and  the  succeeding 
years  of  unceasing  fluctuation,  after  long-continued  and  patient  study 
of  the  most  celebrated  works  in  the  languages  of  ancient  and  modern 
Europe,  in  defence  or  denial  of  this  prime  article  of  human  faith, 
which  (save  to  the  trifler  or  the  worldling)  no  frequency  of  discussion 
can  superannuate,  I  at  length  satisfied  my  own  mind  by  arguments, 
which  placed  me  on  firm  land.  This  one  conviction,  determined,  as 
in  a  mould,  the  form  and  feature  of  my  whole  system  in  religion  and 
morals,  and  e.Yen  in  literature^.  These  arguments  were  not  suggested 
to  me  by  books,  but  forced  on  me  by  reflection  on  my  own  being,  and 


APPENDIX    B.  531 

observation  of  the  ways  of  those  about  me,  especially  of  little  children. 
And  as  they  had  the  power  of  fixing  the  same  persuasion  in  some 
valuable  minds,  much  interested,  and  not  unversed  in  the  controversy, 
and  from  the  manner  probably  rather  than  the  substance,  appeared  to 
them  in  some  sort  original — [for  oldest  reasons  will  put  on  an  impres 
sive  semblance  of  novelty,  if  they  have  indeed  been  drawn  from  the 
fountain-head  of  genuine  self-research] — and  since  the  arguments  are 
neither  abstruse,  nor  dependent  on  a  long  chain  of  deductions,  nor  such 
as  suppose  previous  habits  of  metaphysical  disquisition;  I  shall  deem 
it  my  duty  to  state  them  with  what  skill  I  can,  at  a  fitting  oppor 
tunity,  though  rather  as  the  biographer  of  my  own  sentiments  than  a 
legislator  of  the  opinions  of  other  men. 

At  present,  however,  I  give  it  merely  as  an  article  of  my  own  faith, 
closely  connected  with  all  my  hopes  of  melioration  in  man,  and  lead 
ing  to  the  methods  by  which  alone  I  hold  any  fundamental  or  perma 
nent  melioration  practicable ; — that  there  is  evil  distinct  from  error 
and  from  pain,  an  evil  in  human  nature  which  is  not  wholly  grounded 
in  the  limitation  of  our  understandings.  And  this,  too,  I  believe  to 
operate  equally  in  subjects  of  taste,  as  in  the  higher  concerns  of 
morality.  Were  it  my  conviction,  that  our  follies,  vice,  and  misery, 
have  their  entire  origin  in  miscalculation  from  ignorance,  I  should  act 
irrationally  in  attempting  other  task  than  that  of  adding  new  lights  to 
the  science  of  moral  arithmetic,  or  new  facility  to  its  acquirement. 
In  other  words,  it  would  have  been  my  worthy  business  to  have  set 
forth,  if  it  were  in  my  power,  an  improved  system  of  book-keeping 
for  the  ledgers  of  calculating  self-love.  If,  on  the  contrary,  I  believed 
our  nature  fettered  to  all  its  wretchedness  of  head  and  heart,  by  an 
absolute  and  innate  necessity,  at  least  by  a  necessity  which  no  human 
power,  no  efforts  of  reason  or  eloquence  could  remove  or  lessen  [no, 
nor  even  prepare  the  way  for  such  removal  or  diminution]  ;  I  should 
then  yield  myself  at  once  to  the  admonitions  of  one  of  my  correspon 
dents  [unless,  indeed,  it  should  better  suit  my  humor  to  do  nothing 
than  nothings,  nihil  quam  nikili],  and  deem  it  even  presumptuous  to 
aim  at  other  or  higher  object  than  that  of  amusing,  during  some  ten 
minutes  in  every  week,  a  small  portion  of  the  reading  public. 

CONCLUSION   OF   NO.    I. 

Previously  to  my  ascent  of  Etna,  as  likewise  of  the  Brocken  in 
North-Germany,  I  remember  to  have  amused  myself  with  examining 
the  album  or  manuscript,  presented  to  travellers  at  the  first  stage  of 
the  mountain,  in  which,  on  their  return,  their  fore-runners  had  some 
times  left  their  experience,  and  more  often- disclosed  or  betrayed  their 
own  characters.  Something  like  this  I  have  endeavored  to  do  rela 
tively  to  my  great  predecessors  in  periodical  literature,  from  the 


532  APPENDIX    B. 

Spectator  to  the  Mirror,  or  whatever  later  work  of  excellence  there 
may  be.  But  the  distinction  between  my  proposed  plan  and  all  and 
each  of  theirs,  I  must  defer  to  a  future  essay.  From  all  other  works 
The  Friend  is  sufficiently  distinguished,  either  by  the  very  form  and 
intervals  of  its  publication,  or  by  its  avowed  exclusion  of  the  events 
of  the  day,  and  of  all  personal  politics. 

For  a  detail  of  the  principal  subjects,  which  I  have  proposed  to 
myself  to  treat  in  the  course  of  this  work,  I  must  refer  to  the  Pros- 
jicctus, — printed  at  the  end  of  this  sheet.  But  I  own  I  am  anxious 
to  explain  myself  more  fully  on  the  delicate  subjects  of  religion  and 
politics.  Of  the  former  perhaps  it  may,  for  the  present,  be  enough  to 
say  that  I  have  confidence  in  myself,  that  I  shall  neither  directly  nor 
indirectly  attack  its  doctrines  or  mysteries,  much  less  attempt  basely 
to  undermine  them  by  allusion,  or  tale,  or  anecdote.  What  more  I 
might  dare  promise  of  myself,  I  reserve  for  another  occasion.  Of 
politics,  however,  I  have  many  motives  to  declare  my  intentions  more 
explicitly.  It  is  my  object  to  refer  men  to  principles  in  all  things ; 
in  literature,  in  the  fine  arts,  in  morals,  in  legislation,  in  religion. 
Whatever,  therefore,  of  a  politic  nature  may  be  reduced  to  general 
principles,  necessarily,  indeed,  dependent  on  the  circumstances  of  a 
nation  internal  and  external,  yet  not  especially  connected  with  this 
year  or  the  preceding — this  I  do  not  exclude  from  my  scheme. 
Thinking  it  a  sort  of  duty  to  place  my  readers  in  full  possession,  both 
of  my  opinions  and  the  only  method  in  which  I  can  permit  myself  to 
recommend  them,  and  aware,  too,  of  many  calumnious  accusations, 
as  well  as  gross  misapprehensions  of  my  political  creed,  I  shall  dedi 
cate  my  second  number  entirely  to  the  views,  which  a  British  subject, 
in  the  present  state  of  his  country,  ought  to  entertain  of  its  actual  and 
existing  constitution  of  government.  If  I  can  do  no  positive  good,  I 
may  perhaps  aid  in  preventing  others  from  doing  harm.  But  all  in 
tentional  allusions  to  particular  persons,  all  support  of,  or  hostility 
to,  particular  parties  or  factions,  I  now  and  forever  utterly  disclaim. 
My  principles  command  this  abstinence,  my  tranquillity  requires  it : — 

Tranquillity !  thou  better  name 
Than  all  the  family  of  fame,  &c. 

***** 

But  I  have  transgressed  a  rule,  which  I  had  intended  to  have 
established  for  myself,  that  of  never  troubling  my  readers  with  my 
own  verses : 

he  hinc  Cam&nce  !  vos  quoque,  ite,  suaves, 
J)ulces  CamcRna  !     JVam  (fatebimur  vcruni) 
Dulces  fuistis  :  et  tamen  meas  chartas 
Revisitote  ;  sed  pudenter  et  raro. 

I  shall,  indeed,  very  rarely  and  cautiously,  avail  myself  of  this 
privilege.  For  long  and  early  habits  of  exerting  my  intellect  in  met 
rical  composition  have  not  so  enslaved  me,  but  that  for  some  years 


APPENDIX    C.  533 

I  have  felt,  and  deeply  felt,  that  the  poet's  high  functions  were  not 
my  proper  assignment; — that  many  may  be  worthy  to  listen  to  the 
strains  of  Apollo,  neighbors  of  the  sacred  choir,  and  able  to  discrimi 
nate,  and  feel  and  love  its  genuine  harmonies ;  yet  not  therefore 
called  to  receive  the  harp  in  their  OAvn  hands,  and  join  in  the  concert. 
I  am  content  and  gratified,  that  Spenser,  Shakspeare,  Milton,  have 
not  been  born  in  vain  for  me  :  and  I  feel  it  as  a  blessing,  that  even 
among  my  contemporaries  I  know  one  at  least,  who  has  been  deemed 
worthy  of  the  gift ;  who  has  received  the  harp  with  reverence,  and 
struck  it  with  the  hand  of  power. 


C. 


COMMENCEMENT   OF   NO.    11. 

CONSCIOUS  that  I  am  about  to  deliver  my  sentiments  on  a  subject 
of  the  utmost  delicacy,  to  walk 

per  igncs 
Suppositos  cincri  doloso, 

I  have  been  tempted  by  my  fears  to  preface  them  with  a  motto  of 
unusual  length,  from  an  authority  equally  respected  by  both  of  the 
opposite  parties.  I  have  selected  it  from  an  orator,  whose  eloquence 
has  taken  away  for  Englishmen  all  cause  of  humiliation  from  the 
names  of  Demosthenes  and  Cicero :  from  a  statesman,  who  has  left 
to  our  language  a  bequest  of  glory  unrivalled,  and  all  his  own,  in  the 
keen-eyed,  yet  far-sighted  genius,  with  which  he  has  almost  uni 
formly  made  the  most  original  and  profound  general  principles  of 
political  wisdom,  and  even  recondite  laws  of  human  passions,  bear 
upon  particular  measures  and  events.  While  of  the  harangues  of 
Pitt,  Fox,  and  their  elder  compeers,  on  the  most  important  occur 
rences,  we  retain  a  few  unsatisfactory  fragments  alone,  the  very  flies 
and  weeds  of  Burke  shine  to  us  through  the  purest  amber,  imperish- 
ably  enshrined,  and  valuable  from  the  precious  material  of  their 
embalmment.  I  have  extracted  the  passage  from  that  Burke  whose 
latter  exertions  have  rendered  his  works  venerable,  as  oracular  voices 
from  the  sepulchre  of  a  patriarch,  to  the  upholders  of  government 
and  society  in  their  existing  state  and  order  ;  but  from  a  speech  de 
livered  by  him  while  he  was  the  most  beloved,  the  proudest  name 
with  the  more  anxious  friends  of  liberty  (I  distinguish  them  in 
courtesy  by  the  name  of  their  own  choice,  not  as  implying  any  en 
mity  to  true  freedom  in  the  characters  of  their  opponents)  ;  while  he 
was  the  darling  of  those,  who,  believing  mankind  to  have  been  im- 


534  APPENDIX    C. 

proved,  aro  desirous  to  give  to  forms  of  government  a  similar 
progression. 

From  the  same  anxiety,  I  have  been  led  to  introduce  my  opinions 
on  this  most  hazardous  subject  by  a  preface  of  a  somewhat  personal 
character.  And  though  the  title  of  my  address  is  general,  yet,  I  own, 
I  direct  myself  more  particularly  to  those  among  my  readers,  who, 
from  various  printed  and  imprinted  calumnies,  have  judged  most  un 
favorably  of  my  political  tenets ;  and  to  those,  whose  favor  I  have 
chanced  to  win  in  consequence  of  a  similar,  though  not  equal,  mis 
take.  To  both  I  affirm,  that  the  opinions  and  arguments  I  am  about 
to  detail,  have  been  the  settled  convictions  of  my  mind  for  the  last 
ten  or  twelve  years,  with  some  brief  intervals  of  fluctuation,  and 
those  only  in  lesser  points,  and  known  only  to  the  companions  of  my 
fireside.  From  both  and  from  all  my  readers,  I  solicit  a  gracious 
attention  to  the  following  explanations;  first,  on  the  congruity  of  this 
number  with  the  general  plan  and  object  of  The  Friend,  and  secondly 
on  the  charge  of  arrogance,  which  may  be  adduced  against  the  author 
for  the  freedom  with  which,  in  this  number,  and  in  others  that  will 
follow,  on  other  subjects,  he  presumes  to  dissent  from  men  of  estab 
lished  reputation,  or  even  to  doubt  of  the  justice  with  which  the 
public  laurel  crown,  as  symbolical  of  the  first  class  of  genius  and 
intellect,  has  been  awarded  to  sundry  writers  since  the  Revolution, 
and  permitted  to  wither  around  the  brows  of  our  elder  benefactors, 
from  Hooker  to  Sir  Philip  Sidney,  and  from  Sir  Philip  Sidney  to  Jer 
emy  Taylor  and  Stillingfleet. 

First,  then,  as  to  the  consistency  of  the  subject  of  the  following 
essay  with  the  proposed  plan  of  my  work,  let  something  be  allowed 
to  honest  personal  motives,  a  justifiable  solicitude  to  stand  well  with 
my  contemporaries  in  those  points,  in  which  I  have  remained  unre- 
proached  by  my  own  conscience.  Des  aliquid  famce.  A  reason  of 
far  greater  importance  is  derived  from  the  well-grounded  complaint 
of  sober  minds,  concerning  the  mode  by  which  political  opinions  of 
greatest  hazard  have  been,  of  late  years,  so  often  propagated.  This 
evil  can  not  be  described  in  more  just  and  lively  language  than  in  the 
words  of  Paley,  which,  though  by  him  applied  to  infidelity,  hold 
equally  true  of  the  turbulent  errors  of  political  heresy.  They  are 
"  served  up  in  every  shape  that  is  likely  to  allure,  surprise,  or  beguile 
the  imagination  ;  in  a  fable,  a  tale,  a  novel,  a  poem ;  in  interspersed 
and  broken  hints ;  remote  and  oblique  surmises  ;  in  books  of  travels, 
of  philosophy,  of  natural  history ;  in  a  word,  in  any  form,  rather  than 
the  right  one,  that  of  a  professed  and  regular  disquisition."*  Now, 
in  claiming  for  The  Friend  a  fair  chance  of  unsuspected  admission 
into  the  families  of  Christian  believers  and  quiet  subjects,  I  can  not 
but  deem  it  incumbent  on  me  to  accompany  my  introduction  with  a 
*  Moral  and  Polit,  Philosophy,  B.  V.  c.  9.— Ed. 


APPENDIX    C.  535 

fall  and  fair  statement  of  my  own  political  system  ; — not  that  any 
considerable  portion  of  my  essays  will  be  devoted  to  politics  in  any 
shape,  for  rarely  shall  I  recur  to  them,  except  as  far  as  they  may 
happen  to  be  involved  in  some  point  of  private  morality ;  but  that 
the  encouragers  of  this  work  may  possess  grounds  of  assurance,  that 
no  tenets  of  a  different  tendency  from  these  I  am  preparing  to  state, 
will  be  met  in  it.  I  would  fain  hope,  that  even  those  persons  to 
whose  political  opinions  I  may  run  counter,  will  not  be  displeased  at 
seeing  the  possible  objections  to  their  creed  calmly  set  forth  by  one 
who,  equally  with  themselves,  considers  the  love  of  true  liberty  as  a 
part  both  of  religion  and  morality,  as  a  necessary  condition  of  their 
general  predominance,  and  ministering  to  the  same  blessed  purposes. 
The  development  of  my  persuasions,  relatively  to  religion  in  its  great 
essentials,  will  occupy  a  following  number,  in  which,  and  throughout 
these  essays,  my  aim  will  be,  seldom,  indeed,  to  enter  the  temple  of 
revelation  (much  less  of  positive  institution),  but  to  lead  my  readers 
to  its  threshold,  and  to  remove  the  prejudices  with  which  the  august 
edifice  may  have  been  contemplated  from  ill  chosen  and  unfriendly 
points  of  view. 

But,  independently  of  this  motive,  I  deem  the  subject  of  politics,  so 
treated  as  I  intend  to  treat  it,  strictly  congruous  with  my  general  plan. 
For  it  was  and  is  my  prime  object  to  refer  men  in  all  their  actions, 
opinions,  and  even  enjoyments,  to  an  appropriate  rule,  and  to  aid 
them  with  all  the  means  I  possess,  by  the  knowledge  of  the  facts  on 
which  such  rule  grounds  itself.  The  rules  of  political  prudence  do, 
indeed,  depend  on  local  and  temporary  circumstances  in  a  much  greater 
degree  than  those  of  morality,  or  even  those  of  taste.  Still,  however, 
the  circumstances  being  known,  the  deductions  obey  the  same  law, 
and  must  be  referred  to  the  same  arbiter.  In  a  late  summary  repe- 
rusal  of  our  more  celebrated  periodical  essays,  by  the  contemporaries 
of  Addison  and  those  of  Johnson,  it  appeared  to  me  that  the  objects 
of  the  writers  were,  either  to  lead  the  reader  from  gross  enjoyments 
and  boisterous  amusements,  by  gradually  familiarizing  them  with  more 
quiet  and  refined  pleasures ;  or  to  make  the  habits  of  domestic  life 
and  public  demeanor  more  consistent  with  decorum  and  good  sense, 
by  laughing  away  the  lesser  follies  and  freaks  of  self-vexation,  or  to 
arm  the  yet  virtuous  mind  with  horror  of  the  direr  crimes  and  vices, 
by  exemplifying  their  origin,  progress,  and  results,  in  affecting  tales 
and  true  or  fictitious  biography ;  or  where,  as  in  the  Rambler,  it  is 
intended  to  strike  a  yet  deeper  note,  to  support  the  cause  6f  religion 
and  morality  by  eloquent  declamation  and  dogmatic  precept,  such  as 
may  with  propriety  be  addressed  to  those,  who  require  to  be  awaken 
ed  rather  than  convinced,  whose  conduct  is  incongruous  with  their 
own  sober  convictions  ;  in  short,  to  practical  not  speculative  heretics. 
Revered  forever  be  the  names  of  these  great  and  good  men !  Im- 


536  APPENDIX    C. 

mortal  be  their  fame  ;  and  may  love,  and  honor,  and  docility  of  heart 
in  their  readers  constitute  its  essentials !  iSTot  without  cruel  injustice 
should  I  be  accused  or  suspected  of  a  wish  to  underrate  their  merits, 
because,  in  journeying  toward  the  same  end,  I  have  chosen  a  dhTerent 
road.  Is'ot  wantonly,  however,  have  I  ventured  even  on  this  varia 
tion.  I  have  decided  on  it  in  consequence  of  all  the  observations 
which  I  have  made  on  my  fellow-creatures,  since  I  have  been  able  to 
observe  in  calmness  the  present  age,  and  to  compare  its  phenomena 
with  the  best  indications  we  possess  of  the  character  of  the  ages  be 
fore  us. 

My  time  since  earliest  manhood  has  been  pretty  equally  divided  be 
tween  deep  retirement,  with  little  other  society  than  that  of  one  fam 
ily,  and  my  library,  and  the  occupations  and  intercourse  of  [compara 
tively  at  least]  public  life  both  abroad  and  in  the  British  metropolis. 
But  in  fact  the  deepest  retirement,  in  which  a  well-educated  English 
man  of  active  feelings,  and  no  misanthrope,  can  live  at  present,  sup 
poses  few  of  the  disadvantages  and  negations,  which  a  similar  place 
of  residence  would  have  involved  a  century  past.  Independently  of 
the  essential  knowledge  to  be  derived  from  books,  children,  house 
mates,  and  neighbors,  however  few  and  humble, — newspapers,  their 
advertisements,  speeches  in  parliament,  law  courts,  and  public  meet 
ings,  reviews,  magazines,  obituaries,  and  [as  affording  occasional 
commentaries  on  all  these]  the  diffusion  of  uniform  opinions,  beha 
vior,  and  appearance,  of  fashions  in  things  external  and  internal, 
have  combined  to  diminish,  and  often  to  render  eyanescent,  the  dis 
tinctions  between  the  enlightened  inhabitants  of  the  great  city,  and 
the  scattered  hamlet.  From  all  the  facts,  however,  that  have  occur 
red  as  subjects  of  reflection  within  the  sphere  of  my  experience,  be 
they  few  or  numerous,  I  have  fully  persuaded  my  own  mind,  that  for 
merly  men  were  worse  than  their  principles,  but  that  at  present  the 
principles  are  worse  than  the  men.  For  the  former  half  of  the 
proposition  I  might,  among  a  thousand  other  more  serious  and  Un 
pleasant  proofs,  appeal  even  to  the  Spectators  and  Tatlers.  It  would 
not  be  easy,  perhaps,  to  detect  in  them  any  great  corruption  or  de 
basement  of  the  main  foundations  of  truth  and  goodness  ;  yet  a  man 
— I  will  not  say  of  delicate  mind  and  pure  morals,  but — of  common 
good  manners,  who  means  to  read  an  essay,  which  he  has  opened  upon 
at  hazard  in  these  volumes  to  a  mixed  company,  will  find  it  necessary 
to  take  a  previous  survey  of  its  contents.  If  stronger  illustration  be 
required,  I  would  refer  to  one  of  Shadwell's  comedies,  in  connection 
with  its  dedication  to  the  Duchess  of  Newcastle,  encouraged  as  he 
says,  by  the  high  delight  Avith  which  her  Grace  had  listened  to  the 
author's  private  recitation  of  the  manuscript  in  her  closet.  A  writer 
of  the  present  day,  who  should  dare  address  such  a  composition  to  a 
virtuous  matron  of  high  rank,  would  secure  general  infamy,  and  run 


APPENDIX    C.  537 

no  small  risk  of  Bridewell  or  the  pillory.  "Why  need  I  add  the  plays 
and  poems  of  Dryden,  contrasted  with  his  serious  prefaces  and  decla 
rations  of  his  own  religious  and  moral  opinions  ?  Why  the  little  suc 
cess,  except  among  the  heroes  and  heroines  of  fashionable  life,  of  the 
two  or  three  living  writers  of  prurient  love-odes  [if  I  may  be  forgiven 
for  thus  profaning  the  word  love]  an<J  novels,  at  once  terrific  and 
libidinous  ?  These  gentlemen  erred  both  in  place  and  time,  and  have 
understood  the  temper  of  their  age  and  country  as  ill  as  the  precepts 
of  that  Bible,  which,  notwithstanding  the  atrocious  blasphemy  of  one 
of  them,  the  great  majority  of  their  countrymen  peruse  with  safety  to 
their  morals,  if  not  improvement. 

The  truth  of  the  latter  half  of  the  proposition  in  its  favorable  part 
is  evidenced  by  the  general  anxiety  on  the  subject  of  education,  the 
solicitous  attention  paid  to  several  late  works  on  its  general  princi 
ples,  and  the  unexpected  sale  of  the  very  numerous  large  and  small 
volumes,  published  for  the  use  of  parents  and  instructors,  and  for 
the  children  given  or  intrusted  to  their  charge.  The  first  ten  or  twelve 
leaves  of  our  old  almanac  books,  and  the  copper-plates  of  old  ladies' 
magazines,  and  similar  publications,  will  afford,  in  the  fashions  and 
head-dresses  of  our  grandmothers,  contrasted  with  the  present  simple 
ornaments  of  women  in  general,  a  less  important,  but  not  less  striking 
elucidation  of  my  meaning.  The  wide  diffusion  of  moral  information, 
in  no  slight  degree  owing  to  the  volumes  of  our  popular  essayists, 
has  undoubtedly  been  on  the  whole  beneficent.  But  above  all,  the 
recent  events  [say,  rather,  tremendous  explosions],  the  thunder  and 
earthquakes,  and  deluge  of  the  political  world,  have  forced  habits  of 
great  thoughtfulness  on  the  minds  of  men ;  particularly  in  our  own 
island,  where  the  instruction  has  been  acquired  without  the  stupefy 
ing  influences  of  terror  or  actual  calamity.  We  have  been  compelled 
to  acknowledge  [what  our  fathers  would  have  perhaps  called  it  Avant 
of  liberality  to  assert],  the  close  connection  between  private  libertin 
ism  and  national  subversion.  To  those  familiar  with  the  state  and 
morals,  and  the  ordinary  subjects  of  after-dinner  conversation,  at 
least  among  the  young  men  in  Oxford  and  Cambridge,  only  twenty 
or  twenty-five  years  back,  I  might  with  pleasure  point  out,  in  sup 
port  of  my  thesis,  the  present  state  of  our  two  universities,  which 
has  rather  superseded,  than  been  produced  by  any  additional  vigi 
lance  or  austerity  of  discipline. 

The  unwelcome  remainder  of  the  proposition,  the  "  feet  of  iron  and 
clay,"  the  unsteadiness,  or  falsehood,  or  abasement  of  the  principles, 
which  are  taught  and  received  by  the  existing  generation,  it  is  the 
chief  purpose  and  general  business  of  The  Friend  to  examine,  to  evince, 
and  [as  far  as  my  own  forces  extend,  increased  by  the  contingents 
which,  I  flatter  myself,  will  be  occasionally  furnished  by  abler  patrons 
of  the  same  cause]  to  remedy  or  alleviate.  That  my  efforts  will  effect 

z* 


538  APPENDIX    D. 

little,  I  am  fully  conscious ;  but  by  no  means  admit,  that  little  is  to 
be  effected.  The  squire  of  low  degree  may  announce  the  approach 
of  puissant  knight,  yea,  the  giant  may  even  condescend  to  lift  up  the 
feeble  dwarf,  and  permit  it  to  blow  the  horn  of  defiance  on  his  shoul 
ders. 

Principles,  therefore,  their  subordination,  their  connection,  and 
their  application,  in  all  the  divisions  of  our  duties  and  of  our  pleas 
ures — this  is  my  chapter  of  contents.  May  I  not  hope  for  a  candid 
interpretation  of  my  motive,  if  I  again  recur  to  the  possible  apprehen 
sion  on  the  part  of  my  readers,  that  The  Friend, 

O'erlaid  with  black,  staid  wisdom's  hue, 

with  eye  fixed  in  abstruse  research,  and  brow  of  perpetual  wrinkle,  is 
to  frown  away  the  light-hearted  graces,  and  unreproved  pleasures;  or 
invite  his  guests  to  a  dinner  of  herbs  in  a  hermit's  cell;  if  I  affirm,  that 
inyplan  does  not  in  itself  exclude  either  impassioned  style  or  interest 
ing  narrative,  tale,  or  allegory,  or  anecdote;  and  that  the  defect  will 
originate  in  my  abilities,  not  in  my  wishes  or  efforts,  if  I  fail  to  bring 
forward, 

Due  at  my  hour  prepared 
For  dinner  savory  fruits,  of  taste  to  please 
True  appetite — 
e  In  order,  so  contrived  as  not  to  mix 

Tastes,  not  well  joined,  inelegant,  hut  bring 
Taste  after  taste  upheld  with  kindliest  change.* 


FO.  v. 

THE  comparison  of  the  English  with  the  Anglo-American  news 
papers  will  best  evince  the  difference  between  a  lawless  press  [law 
less,  at  least,  in  practice  and  by  connivance],  and  a  press  at  once  pro 
tected  and  restrained  by  law. 

IBID. 

Chrysippus,  in  one  of  his  Stoical  Aphorisms,  presented  by  Cicero, t 
says : — Nature  has  given  to  the  hog  a  soul  instead  of  salt,  in  order  to 
keep  it  from  putrefying.  This  holds  equally  true  of  man  considered 
as  an  animal.  Modern  physiologists  have  substituted  the  words  vital 
power  [vis  mtai\  for  that  of  soul,  and  not  without  good  reason :  for, 
from  the  effect  we  may  fairly  deduce  the  inherence  of  a  power  pro- 

*  Par.  Lost,  V.  303,  333.—  Ed.  t  De  Natura,  Deorum,  TT.  s.  64.— Ed. 


APPENDIX    D.  539 

ducing  it,  but  are  not  entitled  to  hypostasise  this  power,  that  is,  to 
affirm  it  to  be  an  individual  substance,  any  more  than  the  steam  in 
the  steam-engine,  the  power  of  gravitation  in  the  watch,  or  the  mag 
netic  influence  in  the  lodestone.  If  the  machine  consist  of  parts  mu 
tually  dependent,  as  in  the  time-piece  or  the  hog,  we  can  not  dispart 
without  destroying  it:  if  otherwise,  as  in  a  mass  of  lodestone  and  in 
the  polypus,  the  power  is  equally  divisible  with  the  substance.  The 
most  approved  definition  of  a  living  substance  is,  that  its  vitality  con 
sists  in  the  susceptibility  of  being  acted  upon  by  external  stimulants, 
joined  to  the  necessity  of  reaction,  and  in  the  due  balance  of  this  ac 
tion  and  reaction,  the  healthy  state  of  life  consists.  We  must,  how 
ever,  further  add  the  power  of  acquiring  habits,  and  facilities  by  repe 
tition.  This  being  the  generical  idea  of  life,  is  common  to  all  living 
beings:  but  taken  exclusively,  it  designates  the  lowest  class,  plants 
and  plant-animals.  An  addition  to  the  mechanism  gives  locomotion. 
A  still  costlier  and  more  complex  apparatus  diversely  organizes  the 
impressions  received  from  the  external  powers,  that  fall  promiscu 
ously  on  the  whole  surface.  The  light  shines  on  the  whole  face,  but 
it  receives  form  and  relation  only  in  the  eyes ;  in  them  it  is  organ 
ized.  To  these  organs  of  sense  we  suppose,  by  analogy  from  our  own 
experience,  sensation  attached,  and  these  sensuous  impressions  acting 
on  other  parts  of  the  machine  framed  for  other  stimulants  included  in 
the  machine  itself,  namely,  the  organs  of  appetite ;  and  these  again 
working  on  the  instruments  of  locomotion,  and  on  those  by  which 
the  external  substances  corresponding  to  the  sensuous  impressions  can 
be  acted  upon  [the  mouth,  teeth,  talons,  and  the  like],  constitute  our 
whole  idea  of  the  perfect  animal.  More  than  this  Des  Cartes  denied 
to  all  other  animals  but  man,  and  to  man  himself  as  an  animal :  for 
that  this  truly  great  man  considered  animals  insensible,  or  rather  in 
sensitive,  machines,  though  commonly  asserted,  and  that  in  books  of 
highest  authority,  is  an  error,  and  the  charge  was  repelled  with  dis 
dain  by  himself,  in  a  letter  to  Dr.  Henry  More,  which,  if  T  mistake 
not,  is  annexed  to  the  small  edition  of  More's  Ethics. 

The  strict  analogy,  however,  between  certain  actions  of  sundry  ani 
mals  and  those  of  mankind,  forces  upon  us  the  belief  that  they  possess 
some  share  of  a  higher  faculty ;  which,  however  closely  united  with 
life  in  one  person,  can  yet  never  be  educed  out  of  the  mere  idea  of 
vital  power.  Indeed,  if  we  allow  any  force  to  the  universal  opinion, 
and  almost  instinct,  concerning  the  difference  between  plants  and  ani 
mals,  we  must  hold  even  sensation  as  a  fresh  power  added  to  his  vis 
rita?,  unless  we  would  make  an  end  of  philosophy,  by  comprising  all 
things  in  each  thing,  and  thus  denying  that  any  one  power  of  the  uni 
verse  can  be  affirmed  to  be  itself  and  not  another.  However  this  may 
be,  the  understanding  or  regulative  faculty  is  manifestly  distinct  from 
life  and  sensation ;  its  junction  being  to  take  up  the  passive  affections 


540  APPENDIX    E. 

into  distinct  thought  of  the  sense,  according  to  its  own  essential 
forms.*  These  forms,  however,  as  they  are  first  awakened  by  im 
pressions  from  the  senseSj  so  have  they  no  substance  or  meaning  un 
less  in  their  application  to  objects  of  the  senses :  and  if  we  Avould  re 
move  from  them,  by  careful  abstraction,  all  the  influences  and  inter 
mixtures  of  a  yet  far  higher  faculty  [self-consciousness,  for  instance], 
it  would  be  difficult,  if  at  all  possible,  to  distinguish  its  functions  from 
those  of  instinct,  of  which  it  would  be  no  inapt  definition,  that  it  is  a 
more  or  less  limited  understanding  without  self-consciousness,  or 
spontaneous  origination.  Besides  this,  the  understanding  with  all  its 
axioms  of  sense,  its  anticipations  of  apperception,  and  its  analogies  of 
experience,  has  no  appropriate  object,  but  the  material  world  in  rela~ 
tion  to  our  worldly  interests.  The  far-sighted  prudence  of  man,  and 
the  more  narrow,  but  at  the  same  time  far  more  certain  and  effectual, 
cunning  of  the  fox,  are  both  no  other  than  a  nobler  substitute  for  salt, 
in  order  that  the  hog  may  not  putrefy  before  its  destined  hour. 


E. 


NO.   XII. 

He  who  taketh  the  side  of  justice  maketh  the  land  prosperous:  he  who  withdraweth 
from  the  same  is  an  accomplice  in  its  destruction. 

RABBI  Assi  was  sick,  lay  on  his  bed  surrounded  by  his  disciples,  and 
prepared  himself  for  death.  His  nephew  came  unto  him,  and  found 
him  weeping.  "  Wherefore  weepest  thou,  Rabbi  ?"  he  asked.  "  Must 
not  every  look  which  thou  castest  back  on  thy  past  life,  bring  a 
thought  of  joy  to  thee?  Hast  thou  not  then  sufficiently  studied,  not 
sufficiently  taught  the  sacred  law  ?  Lo  !  thy  disciples  here  are  proofs 
of  the  contrary.  Hast  thou  then  been  backward  in  practising  the 
works  of  righteousness  ?  Every  man  is  satisfied  that  thou  hast  not. 
And  thy  humility  was  the  crown  of  all  thy  virtues  !  Never  wouldst 
thou  suffer  thyself  to  be  elected  the  judge  of  the  district,  anxiously 
as  the  whole  district  wished  it."  "  It  is  even  this,  my  son,"  answered 

*  Aristotle,  the  first  systematic  anatomist  of  the  mind,  constructed  the  first  numeration 
table  of  these  innate  forms  or  faculties  (not  innate  ideas  or  notions)  under  the  names  of 
Categories  :  which  table,  though  both  incomplete  and  erroneous,  remains  an  unequivocal 
proof  of  his  penetration  and  philosophical  genius.  The  best  and  most  orderly  arrange 
ment  of  the  original  forms  of  the  understanding,  the  moulds  as  it  were  both  of  our  notions 
and  judgments  concerning,  the  notices  of  the  senses,  is  that  of  quantity,  quality,  relation, 
and  mode,  each  consisting  of  three  kinds.  There  is  but  one  possible  way  of  making  an 
enumeration  of  them  interesting  or  even  endurable  to  the  general  reader  :  the  history  of 
the  origin  of  certain  useful  inventions  in  machinery  in  the  minds  of  the  inventors. 


APPENDIX    F.  641 

Rabbi  Assi,  "  which  now  troubles  me.  I  had  it  in  my  power  to 
exercise  right  and  justice  among  the  children  of  men,  and  out  of 
mistaken  humility,  I  did  not  avail  myself  thereof.  Whoso  withdraw- 
eth  himself  from  justice  is  an  accomplice  in  the  ruin  of  the  land." 


F. 

NO.  XI Y. 

my  second  term  at  Cambridge,  I  had  for  my  own  amuse 
ment  commenced  a  work  on  the  plan  of  the  well-known  Miseries  of 
Human  Life,  at  least  with  the  same  title ;  for  by  its  title  only,  and 
the  pleasure  expressed  by  all  who  have  spoken  to  me  of  it,  am  I  ac 
quainted  with  that  publication.  But  at  the  same  time  I  had  meant 
to  add,  as  an  appendix,  a  catalogue  raisonne  of  the  sights,  incidents, 
and  employments,  that  leave  us  better  men  than  they  found  us  ;  or, 
to  use  my  original  phrase,  of  the  things  that  do  a  man's  heart  good. 
If  the  seventeen  or  eighteen  years  that  have  elapsed  since  that  period, 
would  enable  me  greatly  to  extend  and  diversify  the  former  list,  the 
latter,  as  more  properly  the  offspring  of  experience  and  reflection, 
would  be  augmented  in  a  still  larger  proportion.  Among  the  addenda 
to  this  second  catalogue  I  should  rank  foremost,  a  long  winter  evening 
devoted,  to  the  re-perusal  of  the  letters  of  far-distant,  or  deceased 
friends.  I  suppose  the  person  so  employed  to  be  one,  whose  time 
is  seldom  at  his  own  disposal,  and  that  he  finds  himself  alone  in  a 
quiet  house,  the  other  inmates  of  which  are  absent  on  some  neigh 
borly  visit.  I  have  been  led  to  this  observation  by  the  numerous  let 
ters  (many  of  which  had  all  the  pleasure  of  novelty  for  me,  joined 
with  the  more  tender  charm  of  awakened  recollection)  from  The 
Friend,  with  a  slight  sketch  of  whose  character  I  have  introduced  the 
present  number  under  the  name,  which  he  went  by  among  his  friends 
and  familiars,  of  Satyrane,*  the  Idoloclast,  or  breaker  of  idols. 

A  few  seasons  ago,  I  made  the  tour  of  the  northern  counties  with 
him  and  three  other  companions.  His  extensive  erudition,  his  en 
ergetic  and  all  too  subtle  intellect,  the  opulence  of  his  imagination, 
and  above  all,  his  inexhaustible  store  of  anecdotes,  which  always  ap 
peared  to  us  the  most  interesting  when  of  himself,  and  his  passionate 
love  of  mountain  imagery,  which  often  gave  an  eloquence  to  his 
looks  and  made  his  very  silence  intelligible,  will  forever  endear  the 

*  The  attentive  reader  will  of  courso  see  that  Sutyrane  is  the  author  himself,  und  that 
this  extract  contains  one  of  the  many  sketches  of  his  own  character,  scattered  through 
out  his  writings. 


542  APPENDIX    F. 

remembrance  of  that  tour  to  the  survivors.  Various  were  our  dis 
cussions,  most  often  with  him,  but  sometimes  [when  we  had  split  our 
party  for  a  few  hours]  concerning  him  and  his  opinions  ;  not  a  few 
of  which  appeared,  to  some  of  us  at  least,  sufficiently  paradoxical, 
though  there  was  nothing  which  lie  bore  with  less  patience  than  the 
hearing  them  thus  characterized.  Many  and  various  were  our  topics, 
often  suggested  by  the  objects  and  occurrences  of  the  moment,  and 
often  occasioned  by  the  absence  of  other  interest.  O  Satyrane  !  who. 
would  not  have  lost  the  sense  of  time  and  fatigue  in  thy  company  ? 
How  often,  after  a  walk  of  fifteen  or  twenty  miles,  on  rough  roads 
and  through  a  dreary  or  uninteresting  country,  have  we  seen  our  pro 
posed  resting-place  with  a  sort  of  pleasant  surprise,  all  joining  in  the 
same  question — "  Who  would  have  thought  we  had  walked  so  far  ?" 
And  then,  perhaps,  we  examined  our  watches,  as  if  half  in  doubt,  or 
perhaps  to  contrast  the  length  of  time  which  had  thus  slipped  away 
from  us,  with  our  own  little  sense  of  its  lapse.  These  discussions, 
and  the  marked  difference  of  our  several  characters  (though  we  wereX 
all  old  acquaintances,  and,  with  one  exception,  all  of  us  fellow-Can- 
tabs),  suggested  to  us  the  plan  of  a  joint  work,  to  be  entitled,  "  Travel 
ling  Conversations."  Since  that  time  I  have  often  renewed  this 
scheme  in  my  mind,  and  pleased  myself  with  the  thought  of  realizing  ^ 
it.  Independently  of  the  delightful  recollections,  the  lively  portrai 
ture  and  inward  music,  which  would  enliven  my  own  fancy  during 
the  composition,  it  appeared  to  me  to  possess  the  merit  of  harmoniz 
ing  an  indefinite  variety  of  matter  by  that  unity  of  interest,  which 
would  arise  from  the  characters  remaining  the  same  throughout,  while 
the  tour  itself  would  supply  the  means  of  introducing  the  most  differ 
ent  topics  by  the  most  natural  connections.  We  had  agreed  to  call 
each  other  by  the  names  of  our  walking-sticks,  each  of  whielj  hap 
pened  to  be  of  a  different  wood ;  Satyrane,  however,  excepted,  who 
was  well  pleased  to  be  called  among  us  by  his  old  college  name,  and 
not  displeased  with  his  learned  agnomen,  when  we  used  with  mock 
solemnity  to  entreat  a  short  reprieve  for  our  prejudices  from  him, 
under  the  lofty  title  of  "  Puissant  and  most  redoubtable  Idoloclastes." 
I  flatter  myself  that  the  readers  of  The  Friend  will  consent  to  travel 
over  the  same  road  with  the  same  fellow-tourist.  High,  indeed,  will 
be  my  gratification,  if  they  should  hereafter  think  of  the  walk  and 
talk  with  The  Friend's  Satyrane,  Holly,  Larch,  Hickory  and  Sycamore, 
with  a  small  portion  of  the  delight  with  which  they  have  accompanied 
the  Spectator  to  his  club,  and  made  acquaintance  with  Will  Honey 
comb,  and  the  inimitable  Sir  Roger  deACoverley.  From  any  imita- 
lion,  indeed,  I  am  precluded  by  the  nature  and  object  of  my  work  ; 
and  for  many  reasons,  the  persons  whom  I  introduce,  must  be  dis 
tinguished  by  their  sentiments,  their  different  kinds  of  information, 
and  their  different  views  of  life  and  society,  rather  than  by  ,any  promi- 


APPENDIX    F.  543 

nent  individuality  of  humor  in  their  personal  characters.  What  they 
were  to  myself  they  will  be  to  my  reader ;  glasses  of  different  colors 
and  various  degrees  of  power,  through  which  truth  and  error,  happi 
ness  and  misery,  may  be  contemplated.  * 

From  his  earliest  youth,  Satyrane  had  derived  his  highest  pleasures 
from  the  admiration  of  moral  grandeur  and  intellectual  energy ;  and, 
during  the  whole  of  his  short  life,  he  had  a  greater  and  more  heart 
felt  delight  in  the  superiority  of  other  men  to  himself,  than  men  in 
general  derive  from  the  belief  of  their  own.  His  readiness  to  imagine 
a  superiority  where  it  did  not  exist,  was,  indeed,  for  many  years,  his 
predominant  weakness.  His  pain  from  the  perception  of  inferiority 
in  others,  whom  he  had  heard  spoken  of  with  any  respect,  was  un 
feigned  and  involuntary,  and  perplexed  him,  as  a  something  which 
he  did  not  comprehend.  In  the  child-like  simplicity  of  his  nature,  he 
talked  to  all  men  as  if  they  were,  at  least,  his  equals  in  knowledge 
and  talents  ;  and  his  familiars  record  many  a  whimsical  anecdote,  and 
many  a  ludicrous  incident,  connected  with  this  habit  of  his  of  scatter 
ing  the  good  seed  on  unreceiving  soils.  When  he  was  at  length  com 
pelled  to  see  and  acknowledge  the  true  state  of  the  morals  and  intel 
lect  of  his  contemporaries,  his  disappointment  was  severe,  and  his 
minji,  always  thoughtful,  became  pensive  and  almost  gloomy  :  for  to 
love  and  sympathize  with  mankind  was  a  necessity  of  his  nature. 
Hence,  as  if  he  sought  a  refuge  from  his  own  sensibility,  he  attached 
himself  to  the  most  abstruse  researches,  and  seemed  to  derive  his 
"purest  delight  from  subjects  that  exercised  the  strength  and  subtlety 
of  his  understanding,  without  awakening  the  feelings  of  his  heart. 
When  I  first  knew  him,  and  for  many  years  after,  this  was  all  other 
wise.  The  sun  never  shone  on  a  more  joyous  being.  The  Letters  of 
earliest  date,  which  I  possess  of  his,  were  written  to  a  common  friend, 
and  contain  the  accounts  of  his  first  travels.  That  I  may  introduce 
him  to  my  readers  in  his  native  and  original  character,  I  now  placo 
before  them  his  first  letter,  written  on  his  arrival  at  Hamburgh.*  I 
have  only  to  premise,  that  Satyrane  was  incapable  of  ridiculing  a 
foreigner  merely  for  speaking  English  imperfectly  ;  but  the  extrava 
gant  vanity  that  could  prompt  a  manj  so  speaking  and  pronouncing, 
to  pride^ himself  on  his  excellence  as  a  linguist,  is  as  honest  a  subject 
of  light  satire,  as  an  old  coquette,  or  as  a  beau  of  threescore  and  ten, 
exposing  the  infirmities  of  old  age  in  a  reel  on  his  wedding-day. 

*  The  Letter  here  alluded -to  was  published  in  the  author's  "  Literary  Life." 


544  APPENDIX    G. 


G. 

~       PEELIMINAET   TO   NO.   XXI. 

Ante  quod  est  in  me^  postque 

****** 

Omnis  habct  gcminas,  hinc  atque  At'nc,  janua  f routes^ 

E  quibus  hose  poptdum  special ;  at  ilia  larem. 
Utque  scdens  vester  primi  prope  limina  tecti 

Janitor  egressus  introitusque  videt ; 
Sic  ego •  OVID.* 

j>  I  HAVE  always  looked  forward  to  the  present  number  of  The 
Friend  as  its  first  proper  starting  post;  for  the  twenty  numbers  pre 
ceding  I  regarded  as  a  preparatory  heat,  in  order  to  determine 
whether  or  no  I  should  be  admitted,  as  a  candidate,  on  that  longer 
course,  on  which  alone  the  speed  and  strength  of  the  racer  can  be 
fairly  proved. 

*  *  *  #  *  * 

I  was  not  so  ignorant  of  mankind  as  to  expect  that  my  essays 
would  be  found  interesting  in  the  hurry  and  struggle  of  active  life. 
All  the  passions  wThich  are  there  at  work  it  was  my  object  to  pre-  • 
elude :  and  I  distinctly  foresaw,  that  by  rejecting  all  appeals  to  per 
sonal  passions,  and  party  spirit,  and  all  interest  grounded  wholly  on 
the  cravings  of  curiosity,  and  the  love  of  novelty  for  its  own  sake,  I 
at  the  same  time  precluded  three  fourths  of  the  ordinary  readers  of 
periodical  publications,  whether  reviews,  magazines,  or  newspapers. 
I  might,  however,  find  dispersedly  what  I  could .  not  hope  to  meet 
with  collectively.  I  thought  it  not  improbable,  that  there  might  be 
individuals,  scattered  throughout  the  kingdom,  to  whom  the  very 
absence  of  such  stimulants  would  prove  a  recommendation  to  the 
work ;  and  that,  when  the  existence  of  such  a  work  was  generally 
known,  a  sufficient  number  of  persons,  able  and  willing  to  patronize 
it,  might  gradually  be  collected. 

*  ***** 

I  ought  to  have  made  it  a  condition,  that  a  notice  of  six  weeks 
should  be  given  of  the  intention  to  discontinue  the  work ; — but  this 
I  neglected  from  unwise  delicacy,  an  habitual  turning  away  from  all 
thoughts  relating  to  money,  and,  from  a  self-flattering  persuasion  that 
those,  who,  after  the  perusal  of  my  Prospectus,  had  determined  on 
giving  the  work  a  trial,  would  be  sensible  of  the  difficulties  it  had  to 
struggle  with,  and  whether  satisfied  or  not  with  its  style  of  execu 
tion,  yet  for  the  earnest  wish  of  The  Friend,  not  only  to  please  them, 

*  Fast.  I.  114,  135,  &c.-Ed. 

t  The  following  passages  are  extracted  from  an  address  by  Mr.  Coleridge  to  his  sub 
scribers,  and  to  the  readers  of  The  Friend  in  general.— Ed. 


APPENDIX    G.  545 

but  to  please  them  in  such  a  way  as  might  leave  them  permanently 
better  pleased  Avith  themselves,  would  be  disposed  rather  to  lessen 
than  increase  them. 

****** 
Among  other  things  of  the  kind,  a  person,  signing  himself  "  Oar- 
lyol,"  has  addressed  a  threatening  and  abusive  letter  to  me  from 
Dover.  I  shall  not  tell  him  that  such  an  act  was  ungentlemanly,  un 
manly,  and  unchristian,  for  this  would  be  to  him  the  same  "  learned 
mmsenee  and  unintelligible  j&rgin"  for  which  he  abuses  me  ;  but  some 
other  points  I  may  venture  to  press  on  his  attention.  First,  that  it 
was  a  lack  of  common  honesty  in  h«n  to  write  a  letter  with  a  ficti 
tious  signature,  and  not  pay  the .  postage  :  secondly,  that  it  was  in 
judicious  to  address  the  letter  to  me,  as  the  editor  of  the  Courier  is 
alone  responsible  for  the  appearance  of  the  passages  which  have 
offended  him,  and  the  other  admirers  of  Bonaparte  in  that  paper : 
thirdly,  that  there  is  one  branch  of  learning  without  which  learning 
itself  can  not  be  railed  at  with  common  decency,  namely,  spelling : 
and  lastly,  that  unintelligibility  is  a  very  equivocal  charge.  It  cer 
tainly  may  arise  from  the  author,  especially  if  he  should  chance  to 
be  deficient  in  that  branch  of  erudition  last  mentioned ;  but  it  may 
likewise,  and  often  does,  arise  from  the  reader,  and  this  from  more 
than  one  cause.  He  may  have  an  idiotic  understanding,  and  what  is 
far  more  common,  as  well  as  incomparably  more  lamentable,  he  may 
have  an  idiotic  heart.  To  this  last  cause  must  we  attribute  the  com 
mission  of  such  crimes  as  provoke  the  vengeance  of  the  law,  by  men 
who  can  not  but  have  heard  from  the  pulpit  truths  and  warnings, 
which,  though  evident  to  their  understandings,  were,  unhappily  for 
them,  religious  nonsense  and  unintelligible  jargon  to  their  bad  hearts. 
And  I  feel  it  my  duty  to  press  on  my  correspondent's  reflection  the 
undoubted  fact,  that  a  man  may  be  quite  fool  enough  to  be  a  rogue, 
and  yet  not  appear  foei  enough  to  save  him  from  the  legal  conse 
quences  of  his  roguery. 

IBID. 

During  the  composition  of  this  last  paragraph,*  I  have  been  aware 
that  I  shall  appear  to  have  been  talking  arrogantly,  and  with  an  un 
warrantable  assumption  of  superiority;  but  a  moment's  reflection 
will  enable  my  reader  to  acquit  me  of  this  charge,  as  far  as  it  is,  or 
ought  to  be  a  charge.  He  will  recollect  that  I  have  been  giving  the 
history  of  my  own  mind  ;  and  that,  if  it  had  been  my  duty  to  believe, 
that  the  main  obstacle  to  the  success  of  my  undertaking  existed  not 
in  the  minds  of  others,  but  in  my  own  insufficiency  and  inferiority,  I 
ought  not  to  have  undertaken  it  at  all.  To  a  sincere  and  sensible 
*  On  thought  and  attention  contained  in  Essay  2,  p.  27.— Ed. 


546  APPENDIX    G. 

mind  it  can  not  but  be  disgusting,  to  find  an  author  writing  on  sub 
jects,  to  the  investigation  of  which  he  professes  to  have  devoted  the 
greater  portion  of  his  life,  and  yet  appealing  to  all  his  readers  promis 
cuously,  as  his  full  and  competent  judges,  and  thus  soliciting  their 
favor  by  a  mock  modesty,  which  either  convicts  him  of  gross  hypoc 
risy,  or  the  most  absurd  presumption.  For  what  can  be  conceived 
at  once  more  absurd  and  psesumptuous,  than  for  a  man  to  write  and 
publish  books  for  the  instruction  of  those  who  are  wiser  than  him 
self,  more  learned,  and  more  judicious?  Humility,  like  all  other  vir 
tues,  must  exist  in  harmony  with  truth.  My  heart  bears  me  witness 
that  I  would  gladly  give  up  all  the  pleasures  which  T  can  ever  derive 
from  literary  reputation,  could  I  receive  instead  of  them  a  deep  con 
viction,  that  The  Friend  has  failed  in  pleasing  no  one,  whose  own 
superiority  had  not  rendered  the  essays  tiresome,  because  superfluous. 
And  why  should  that  be  deemed  a  mark  of  self-sufficiency  in  an 
author,  which  would  be  thought  only  common  sense  in  a  musician  or 
a  painter,  namely,  the  supposition  that  he  understands  and  can  prac 
tise  those  arts,  to  which  he  has  devoted  his  best  faculties- during  life, 
in  consequence  of  a  particular  predilection  for  them,  better  than  the 
mass  of  mankind,  who  have  given  their  time  and  thoughts  to  other 
pursuits  ?  There  is  one  species  of  presumption  among  authors  which 
is  truly  hateful,  and  which  betrays  itself,  when  writers,  who,  in  their 
prefaces,  have  prostrated  themselves  before  the  superiority  of  their 
readers  as  supreme  judges,  will  yet,  in  their  works,  pass  judgments  on 
Plato,  Milton,  Shakspeare,  Spenser,  and  their  compeers,  in  blank  as 
sertions  and  a  peremptory  ipse-dixi,  and  with  a  grossness  of  censure, 
which  a  sensible  schoolmaster  would  not  apply  to  the  exercises  of 
the  youths  in  his  upper  forms.  I  need  no  outward  remembrances  of 
my  own  inferiority,  but  I  possess  them  on  almost  every  shelf  of  my 
library ;  and  the  very  book  which  I  am  now  using  as  my  writing- 
desk  (Lord  Bacon's  Novum  Organum)  inspire^  an  awe  and  heartfelt 
humility,  which  I  would  not  exchange  for  all  the  delight  which 
Bonaparte  can  enjoy  at,  the  moment  that  his  crowned  courtiers  hail 
him  emperor  of  emperors,  and  lord  paramount  of  the  "West. 

As  the  week,  which  is  to  decide  on  the  continuance  of  The  Friend, 
coincides  with  the  commencement  of  the  new  year,  the  present  ad 
dress  has  not  inappropriately  taken  its  character  from  the  two-faced 
god  to  whom  the  first  month  is  indebted  for  its  name ;  it  being  in 
part  retrospective,  and  in  part  prospective.  Among  the  various 
reasons  which  Ovid,  in  the  passage  from  which  I  have  taken  my 
motto,  has  made  Janus  himself  assign  for  his  bifront  appearance,  he 
has  omitted  the  most  obvious  intention  of  the  emblem,  that  of  in 
structing  his  worshipers  to  commence  the  new  year  with  a  religious, 
as  well  as  prudential,  review  of  their  own  conduct,  and  its  conse 
quences  during  the  past  year ;  and  thus  to  look  onward  to  the  year 


APPENDIX    G.  547 

before  them  with  wiser  plans,  and  with  strengthened  or  amended 
resolutions.  I  will  apply  this  to  my  own  conduct  as  far  as  it  con 
cerns  the  present  publication;  and  having  already  sufficiently  in 
formed  the  reader  of  the  general  plan  which  I  had  proposed  to  my 
self,  I  will  now,  with  the  same  simplicity,  communicate  my  own 
calm  judgment  on  the  manner  in  which  that  plan  has  been- so  far 
realized  and  the  outline  filled  up.  My  first  number  bears  marks  of 
the  effort  and  anxiety  with  which  it  was  written,  and  is  composed 
less  happily  than  I  could  wish.  It  assuredly  had  not  the  cheerful 
winning  aspect,  which  a  door-keeper,  presenting  the  bill  of  fare, 
ought  to  possess.  Its  object,  however,  was  so  far  answered,  as  it 
announced  distinctly  the  fundamental  position  or  grand  postulate  on 
which  the  whole  superstructure,  with  all  its  supporting  beams  and 
pillars,  was  to  rest.  I  call  it  a  postulate,  not  only  because  I  deferred 
the  proofs,  but  because,  in  strictness,  it  was  not  susceptible  of  any 
proof  from  without.  The  sole  possible  question  was — Is  it,  or  is  it 
not,  a  fact  ? — and  for  the  answer  every  human  being  must  be  referred, 
to  his  own  consciousness. 

*       .         *  *  •*  *  * 

If  man  be  a  free  agent,  his  good  and  evil  must  not  be  judged  ac 
cording  to  the  nature  of  his  outward  actions,  or  tlie  mere  legality  of 
his  conduct,  but  by  the  final  motive  and  intention  of  the  mind.  Now 
the  final  motive  of  an  intelligent  will  is  a  principle  :  and  consequently 
to  refer  the  opinions  of  men  to  principles  (that  is  to  absolute  and 
necessary,  instead  of  secondary  and  contingent,  grounds)  is  the  best 
and  only  secure  way  of  referring  the  feelings  of  men  to  their  proper 
objects.  In  the  union  of  both  consists  the  perfection  of  the  human 
character. 

The  same  subject  was  illustrated  in  my  second  essay,  and  reasons 
assigned  from  the  peculiar  circumstances  of  the  age,  and  the  present 
state  of  the  minds  of  men,  for  giving  this  particular  direction  to  their 
serious  studies,  instead  of  the  more  easy  and  attractive  mode  of  in 
struction  adapted  by  my  illustrious  predecessors  in  periodical  litera 
ture.  At  the  same  time,  being  conscious  how  many  authorities  of 
recent,  but  for  that  reason  more  influential  reputation  I  must  of  ne 
cessity  contravene  in  the  support  and  application  of  my  principles, 
both  in  criticism  and  philosophy,  I  thought  it  requisite  to  state  the 
true  nature  of  presumption  and  arrogance,  and  thus,  if  it  were  possi 
ble,  preclude  the  charge  in  cases  where  I  had  not  committed  the 
offence.  The  object  of  the  next  four  numbers  was  to  demonstrate  the 
innoxiousness  of  truth,  if  only  the  conditions  were  preserved  which 
the  reason  and  conscience  dictated  ;  to  show  at  large  what  those  con 
ditions  were  which  ought  to  regulate  the  conduct  of  the  individual  in 
the  communication  of  truth  ;  and  by  what  principles  the  civil  law 
ought  to  be  governed  in  the  punishment  of  libels.  Throughout  the 


548  APPENDIX    G. 

whole  of  these  numbers,  and  more  especially  in  the  latter  two,  I 
again,  and  again  recalled  the  attention  of  the  reader  to  the  paramount 
importance  of  principles,  alike  for  their  moral  and  their  intellectual, 
for  their  private  and  national,  consequences ;  the  importance,  I  say, 
of  principles  of  reason,  as  distinct  from,  and  paramount  to,  the  max 
ims  of  prudence,  even  for  prudence'  sake.  Some  of  my  readers  will 
probably  have  seen  this  subject  supported  by  other  and  additional  ar 
guments  in  my  seventh  letter,  '  On  the  grounds  of  hope  for  a  people 
warring  against  Armies,'  published  during  the  last  month,  in  the 
Courier. 

In  the  mean  time  I  was  aware,  that  in  thus  grounding  my  opinions 
in  literature,  morals  and  religion,  I  should  frequently  use  the  same  or 
similar  language,  as  had  been  applied  by  Rousseau,  the  French  physio- 
cratic  philosophers,  and  their  followers  in  England,  to  the  nature  and 
rightful  origin  of  civil  government.  The  remainder  of  my  work, 
therefore,  hitherto  has  been  devoted  to  the  purpose  of  averting  this 
mistake,  as  far  as  I  have  not  been  compelled  by  the  general  taste  of 
my  readers  to  interrupt  tne  systematic  progress  of  the  plan  by  essays 
of  a  lighter  kind,  or  which  at  least  required  a  less  effort  of  attention. 
In  truth,  since  my  twelfth  number,  I  have  not  had  courage  to  renew 
any  subject  which  did  require  attention.  The  way  to  be  admired  is 
to  tell  the  reader  what  he  knew  before,  but  clothed  in  a  statelier 
phraseology,  and  embodied  in  apt  and  lively  illustrations.  To  attempt 
to  make  a  man  wiser  is  of  necessity  to  remind  him  of  his  ignorance, 
and  in  the  majority  of  instances,  the  pain  actually  felt  is  so  much 
greater  than  the  pleasure  anticipated,  that  it  is  natural  that  men 
should  attempt  to  shelter  themselves  from  it  by  contempt  or  neglect. 
For  a  living  writer  is  yet  sub  judice :  anil  if  we  can  not  follow  his 
conceptions  or  enter  into  his  feelings,  it  is  more  consoling  to  our 
pride,  as  well  as  more  agreeable  to  our  indolence,  to  consider  him  as 
lost  beneath,  than  as  soaring  out  of  our  sight  above  us.  Itaque  ad 
agitur,  ut  ignorantia  etiam  cib  ignominia  liberetur.  Happy  is  that 
man,  who  can  truly  say,  with  Giordano  Bruno,  and  whose  circum 
stances  at  the  same  time  permit  him  to  act  on  the  sublime  feeling; — 

Procedat  nudus^  qucm  non  ornant  nubile.) 
Sol :  non  conveniunt  quadrupedum  phalerm 
Humano  dorso.     Porro  vcri  species 
Qucesita,  inventa,  ct  patefacta,  me  rfferat, 

Etsi  nullus  intelligat) 
Si  cum  natura  sap>o  ct  sub  numine, 

Id  vere  plusquam  satis  est. 

Should  the  number  of  subscribers  remaining  on  my  list  be  sufficient 
barely  to  pay  the  expenses  of  the  publication,  I  shall  assuredly  pro 
ceed  in  the  present  form,  at  least  till  I  have  concluded  all  the  subjects 
which  have  been  left  imperfect  in  the  preceding  essays.  And  this,  as 
far  as  I  car*  at  present  calculate,  will  extend  the  present  volume  to 


APPENDIX    G.  549 

the  twenty-eighth  or  perhaps  thirtieth  number.  The  first  place  will 
be  given  to  '  Fragments  and  sketches  of  the  life  of  the  late  Admiral 
Sir  Alexander  Ball.'  I  shall  next  finish  the  important  subject  left  in 
complete  at  the  ninth  number,  and  demonstrate  that  despotism  and 
barbarism  are  the  natural  result  of  a  national  attempt  to  realize  anti- 
feudalism,  or  the  system  of  philosophical  jacobinism.  This  position 
will  be  illustrated  and  exemplified  at  each  step  by  the  present  state 
of  France  ;  and  the  essay  will  conclude  with  a  detailed  analysis  of  the 
character  of  Bonaparte,  promised  by  the  author  so  many  years  ago  in 
the  Morning  Post,  as  a  companion  to  the  character  of  Mr.  Pitt,  which 
I  have  been  requested  by  men  of  the  highest  reputation  in  the  philo 
sophical  and  literary  world,  to  republish  in  a  more  permanent  form. 
In  the  third  place,  I  shall  conduct  the  subject  of  taxation  to  a  conclu 
sion,  my  essay  on  which  has  been  grossly  misunderstood.  These 
misconceptions  and  misrepresentations  I  shall  use  rny  best  efforts  to 
remove ;  and  then  develop  the  influences  of  taxation  and  a  national 
debt,  on  the  foreign  trade  of  Great  Britain:  and  lastly  [the  only 
mournful  part  of.  the  tale],  on  the  principles  and  intellectual  habits  of 
the  country.  And  the  volume,  whether  it  be  destined  to  stand  alone 
or  as  the  first  of  a  series,  will  conclude  with  a  philosophical  examina 
tion  of  the  British  constitution  in  all  its  branches,  separately  and  col 
lectively.  To  the  next,  or  twenty-first  number,  I  shall  annex  a  note 
of  explanation  requested  by  many  intelligent  readers,  concerning  my 
use  of  the  words  '  reason1  and  '  understanding,'  as  far  as  is  requisite 
for  the  full  comprehension  of  the  political  essays  from  the  seventh  to 
the  eleventh  numbers.  But  as  I  am  not  likely  to  receive  back  my  list 
of  subscribers  from  London  within  less  than  ten  days,  and  must  till 
then  remain  ignorant  of  the  names  of  those  who  may  have  given 
orders  for  the  discontinuance  of  The  Friend,  I  am  obliged  to  suspend 
the  publication  for  one  week.  I  can  not  conclude  this  address  with 
out  expressions  of  gratitude  to  those  who  have  written  me  letters  of 
encouragement  and  respect ;  but  at  the  same  time  entreat,  that  in 
their  friendly  efforts  to  serve  the  work  by  procuring  new  names  for 
it,  they  will  apply  to  such  only  as,  they  have  cause  to  believe,  will  bo 
actually  pleased  with  a  work  of  this  kind.  Such  only  can  be  of  real 
advantage  to  The  Friend  :  and  even  if  it  were  otherwise,  he  ought  not 
"to  wish  it.  An  author's  success  should  always  depend  on  feelings  in 
spired  exclusively  by  his  writings,  and  on  the  sense  of  their  having 
been  useful  to  the  person  who  recommends  them.  On  this  supposi 
tion,  and  on  this  only,  such  recommendation  becomes  a  duty. 


550  APPENDIX    H. 

IBID. 

NO.    XXI. 

As  to  myself,  and  my  own  present  attempt  to  record  the  life  and 
character  of  the  late  Admiral  Sir  Alexander  Ball,  I  have  already 
stated  that  I  consider  myself  as  debarred  from  all  circumstances,  not 
appertaining  to  his  conduct  or  character  as  a  public  functionary  that 
involve  the  names  of  the  living  for  good  or  for  evil.  Whatever  facts 
and  incidents  I  relate  of  a  private  nature,  must  for  the  most  part  con 
cern  Sir  Alexander  Ball  exclusively,  und  as  an  insulated  individual. 
But  I  needed  not  this  restraint.  It  will  be  enough  for  me,  still  as  I 
write,  to  recollect  the  form  and  character  of  Sir  Alexander  Ball  him 
self,  to  represent  to  my  own  feelings  the  inward  contempt,  with  which 
he  would  have  abstracted  his  mind  from  worthless  anecdotes  and 
petty  personalities ; — a  contempt  rising  into  indignation,  if  ever  an 
illustrious  name  were  used  as  the  thread  to  string  them  upon.  If 
this  recollection  be  my  Socratic  demon  to  warn  and  to  check  me,  I 
shall  on  the  other  hand  derive  encouragement  from  the  remembrance 
of  the  tender  patience,  the  sweet  gentleness,  with  which  he  was  wont 
to  tolerate  the  tediousness  of  well-meaning  men  ;  and  the  inexhausti 
ble  attention,  the  unfeigned  interest,  with  which  he  would  listen  for 
hours,  where  the  conversation  appealed  to  reason,  and  like  the  bee 
made  honey  while  it  murmured. 


H. 

NO.    XXII. 

To  the  doctrine  of  retribution  after  death  the  philosopher  made 
the  following  objection.  u  When  the  soul  is  disunited  from  the  body, 
to  which  will  belong  the  guilt  of  the  offences  committed  during  life  ? 
Certainly  not  to  the  body ;  for  this,  when  the  soul  takes  its  departure, 
lies  like  a  clod  of  earth,  and  without  the  soul  would  never  have  been 
capable  of  offending :  and  as  little  would  the  soul  have  defiled  itself 
with  sin  but  for  its  union  with  the  flesh.  Which  of  the  two  then  is 
the  proper  object  of  the  divine  justice?"  "  God's  wisdom  only,"  an 
swered  the  Eabbi,  "  fully  comprehends  the  way  of  his  justice.  Yet 
the  mortal  may  without  offence,  if  with  humility,  strive  to  render 
the  same  intelligible  to  himself  and  his  fellows.  A  householder  had 
in  his  fruit  garden  two  servants,  the  one  lame  and  the  other  blind. 
Yonder,  said  the  lame  man  to  the  blind,  on  those  trees  I  see  most 


APPENDIX    H.  551 

delicious  fruit  hang,  take  me  on  thy  shoulders  and  we  will  pluck 
thereof.  This  they  did,  and  thus  robbed  their  benefactor  who  had 
maintained  them,  as  unprofitable  servants,  out  of  his  mere  goodness 
and  compassion.  The  master  discovered  the  theft,  and  called  the  two 
ingrates  to  account.  Each  threw  off  the  blame  from  himself,  the  one 
urging  in  his  defence  his  incapability  of  seeing  the  fruit,  and  the  other 
the  want  of  power  to  get  at  it.  What  did  the  master  of  the  house 
do  ?  lie  placed  the  lame  man  upon  the  blind,  and  punished  them  in 
the  same  posture  in  which  they  had  committed  the  offence.  So  will 
the  Judge  of  the  world  do  with  the  soul  and  body  of  man." 


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